The Republican focus should, of course, include that solvency promised by Mr. Bush when he was campaigning for president, which is different from his focus as a campaigner for reelection.
Now John Esposito, surveying the legislation, will attempt to calculate the extent to which he benefits from it. Apparently he will benefit a great deal, if his drug costs are cut in half. But he will require special skills, more skills, in point of fact, than any economic analyst has, successfully to trace the ancillary costs of the $40 billion per year program. The principal one of these is, of course, inflation. Somebody has to pay the cost of the subsidy, even if it is everybody else except Esposito, and the effect on the paying class is to displace energy from private enterprise, to paying more money into the federal government. And, of course, individual states, with their individual programs, tie in to the federal program in their own way, and Esposito can't be absolutely sure exactly how much of the apparent subsidy he is in fact paying for by invisible costs, but not, like the income tax, unsightly, if Congress can figure out a way to do this.
The GOP thinking machine lost ground on the whole health issue years ago when it adopted universalization. There is no reason for wealthier citizens to pass on the cost of their medicine. When such costs become truly unbearable, the catastrophic protection concept becomes relevant. If help were to become available after 10 percent of one's income was exceeded by health costs, you would preserve the idea of proportionality, and competition would set in immediately at the consumer level. If, up until he spent over $3,500 per year on doctors and drugs, Esposito had to pay for them himself, he would measure carefully his consumption, and the price asked by the providers. The Ross Perots could not, one assumes, ever achieve health costs exceeding 10 percent of their income, and so would not stand to benefit from whatever it is Congress finally comes up with.
If there were a drug that required politicians to divulge the true reason for their legislation, that drug should be free, and compulsory.