Breaks my heart to see weathy corporations trying to put over something
on the sick.  

Allowing as how everyone reading at this newsgroup   i s  ill or loves
somone who is so, and that not all of us are wealthy, you have my kind
permission to squawk about the spaminess of the following from the NY
Times:

<<<
Op-Ed Columnist: AARP Gone Astray
November 21, 2003
 By PAUL KRUGMAN

"This is a good bill that will help every Medicare beneficiary," wrote
Tom Scully, the Medicare administrator, in a letter to The New York
Times defending the prescription drug bill. That's flatly untrue. (Are
you surprised?) As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points
out, the bill will force millions of beneficiaries to pay more for
drugs, thanks to a provision that cuts off supplemental aid from
Medicaid. Poorer recipients may find previously affordable drugs moving
out of reach.
That's only one of a number of anti-retiree measures tucked away in the
bill. It contains several Trojan horse provisions that are clearly
intended to undermine Medicare over time - it will allow private
insurers to cherry-pick healthy clients in selected cities, and it will
heavily subsidize private plans competing with traditional Medicare.
Meanwhile, the bill prohibits Medicare from using its bargaining power
to cut drug prices; drug company stocks have soared since the bill's
details became public.
Yet the bill has a good chance of passing, thanks to an endorsement from
AARP, the retiree advocacy organization, which has already begun an
expensive advertising campaign on the bill's behalf. What's going on?
Let's step back a minute. This is a bill with huge implications for the
future of Medicare. It's also, at best, highly controversial. One might
therefore have expected an advocacy group for retired Americans to take
its time in responding - to make sure that major groups of retirees
won't actually be hurt, and to poll its members to be sure that they are
well informed about what the bill contains and don't object to it.
Instead, AARP has thrown its weight behind an effort to ram the bill
through before Thanksgiving. And no, it's not urgent to get the bill
passed so retirees can get immediate relief. The plan won't kick in
until 2006 in any case, so no harm will be done if the nation takes some
time to consider.
Many of AARP's members feel betrayed. The message boards at the
organization's Web site have filled up with outraged posts. A number of
those posts say something like this: "Now you're just an insurance
company." Indeed, that may get to the heart of the matter.
Over the years AARP has become much more than an advocacy and service
organization for older Americans. It receives more than $150 million
each year in commissions on insurance, mutual funds and prescription
drugs sold to its members.
And this Medicare bill is very friendly to insurance and drug companies.
Senator John Breaux, one of only two Democrats who participated in
negotiations over the bill, takes the controversy as a good sign: "No
one got everything they wanted." But as Jonathan Cohn points out in The
New Republic, drug and insurance companies got exactly what they wanted:
no efforts to limit prices, generous subsidies and lots of additional
business. For example, insurance companies that offer an alternative to
Medicare will not only be able to pick and choose their customers, but
will also get 30 percent more per client than the government spends on
the average Medicare recipient.
So do AARP executives support this bill because they hope to share in
the bounty? Maybe, but it probably runs deeper than that. Once an
advocacy group becomes as much a business as a service organization, its
executives are likely to start identifying more with industry interests
than with the groups they are supposed to serve.
Thus it may seem odd on the surface that William Novelli, AARP's chief
executive, wrote a glowing preface to Newt Gingrich's book on health
care reform. After all, Mr. Gingrich has long advocated turning the
administration of Medicare over to private companies - an unpopular
idea, and also an expensive one (forget the clichés about inefficient
government: private companies have much higher overhead than Medicare).
But what looks like wasted money to taxpayers and retirees looks like
opportunity to private providers. Enough said.
Am I being too cynical? How could I be? In case you haven't noticed, we
live in a golden age of pork: the other big piece of legislation
marching through Congress, the energy bill, makes the Smoot-Hawley
tariff look like a classic of good government.

So it should come as no surprise that Medicare "reform" appears likely
to be another triumph for the coalition of the bought-off - a coalition
that, sadly, includes AARP.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/opinion/21KRUG.html?ex=1070691332&ei=1&en755a
2d1c913e36


I  h a v e  deleted all the text about how great the New York Times is.
However, you  c a n   subscribe to their on line edition.  The only cost
to you is quite a bit of bother---Jack