Bartlett on Tom Scully's Op-Ed

Whenever discussing the "tremendous cost" of the Health Care bill, if you dare mention the $1 trillion unfunded Medicare Part D program to a Republican, they respond by putting fingers in both ears and start screaming la-la-la-la-la-la-la over you.  

Bruce Bartlett explains:

This morning's paper carries an op-ed criticizing health care reform primarily on the grounds that it will cost too much. It urges that the plan be sharply scaled back so that it will get bipartisan support.

If this op-ed were written by a Republican member of Congress it would be unremarkable; not even worth publishing. But this particular op-ed was authored by someone who appears to have meaningful expertise on the subject. The writer, Tom Scully, is identified as the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a White House official during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Given this resume, one might think that Scully was a career health professional, an expert that those on both sides of an issue might look to for counsel and guidance. In fact, Scully is a rank Republican political hack who was responsible for one of the most reprehensible episodes in recent American political history. It was Scully who helped ram through Congress the totally unfunded Medicare Part D program that will cost taxpayers roughly $1 trillion over the next decade--that's $1 trillion more than Obama's plan, which is fully paid for according to the Congressional Budget Office.

 Worth the read.   Included within, he also reposts his November '09 detailing of Scully's hypocrisy with a great lead-in:

Rather than go through the whole sorry story again, I am reprinting below my Forbes column from last year in which I discussed Scully's duplicitous behavior. Included are hyperlinks documenting his culpability for saddling taxpayers with trillions of dollars of debt just so his party could buy the votes of seniors and win the 2004 election.