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In "One of Life's Great Mysteries, cross1242 writes: "I read somewhere that Medicare's new prescription plan will cost $1.2 billion (with a "B") unlike the official projection at the time it passed of no more than $300 million (and a silenced analyst's projection of $600 million)."
In only cross were right. The latest estimate is indeed a fourfould increase over the originallowball estimate, but cross is off by a factor of 1,000; the original estimate was $300 billion (with a "b") over ten years, and the silenced analyst's projection was for $600 billion. The latest estimate is $1.2 trillion (with a "tr"), or $1,200 billion over ten years. That's $100 billion a year, about the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars -- so far. As Everett Dirksen famously put it, pretty soon we'll be talking about real money.
I'm sure I won't be the only one to point out this discrepancy.
cross is absolutely right in the rest of his letter though. There is indeed something enormously wrong. This law was written by and for the pharmas and insurance companies, and they're the only ones profiting from it. They and the congressional members they've paid off.
