Posted on: Thursday, March 18, 2004

EDITORIAL
Will Medicare costs hurt Bush campaign?

It's just possible that the straw that breaks President Bush's remarkable immunity from accountability will prove to be the new Medicare law offering prescription drug benefits and private health plans to the elderly.

No one was more startled than conservative Republicans when, in another departure from his campaign platform, Bush endorsed this huge expansion of spending.

And it is those conservatives who are most shocked and outraged to learn that the same White House that promised them that the cost of this program would not exceed $400 billion over the next decade is now saying the cost will be one-third higher — $530 billion, confirming their worst fears.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats are demanding an investigation into charges that the Bush administration threatened to fire the chief actuary of the Medicare program last year if he gave Congress the real price tag of the legislation.

On the campaign trail, Sen. John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential nominee, regularly attacks the new law as a special-interest giveaway "that does more for drug companies than seniors," as he put it on Monday.

Bush now is hearing outrage from both sides of the aisle in Congress. We'd bet that if any of it is to stick, it will have to come from the right side.