Health policy expert (and good friend) Bob Laszewski was interviewed on NPR this morning about the Part D program, bringing a little much-needed perspective to this over-spun topic. The net - if enrollment among "voluntaries" (those without present coverage) does not increase 500% the program is a disaster.

Here are the quotes from Judy Rovner's piece:

"…(HHS Secretary) Leavitt said new enrollment numbers show the efforts are working. "In the last 30 days more than 2.6 million people have enrolled in the plan, bringing the total to 24 million," he said. "We're on track to meet the 28 to 30 million goal this year."

But others say those numbers aren't as impressive as they sound. "They talk about well on their way to 30 million being covered," says Robert Laszewski, a political analyst and insurance industry health consultant, "but in fact 22 million people already had drug coverage before Part D went into effect."

Laszewski says the more important statistic is what the 21 million Medicare patients who didn't have drug coverage have done. "Only 3.6 million have signed up through Jan. 15. that's only 17 percent. And that's after more than 2 months of hype, of advertising, of the president going around the country giving speeches about it," he says.

In fact, judging from the early signup, Laszewski says he thinks the program is on track to enroll between 30 and 40 percent of seniors who previously lacked drug coverage, "and that's certainly not a public policy success. It's clearly not a political success for the president and Republicans because so many seniors are upset about the way this thing's been handled."

And Laszewski says the program could be on its way to being a business failure as well. "Because it's important in a voluntary program like this to get a good cross section of people, the sick and healthy both, coming together to finance the program. If we're getting just 30 to 40 percent of seniors, chances are we're getting just the ones who think they can make money on it, which means the insurance companies won't make money on it," he says.

Which means the taxpayers will have to subsidize it. Either the taxpayers or the Chinese, and they are looking increasingly reluctant to keep paying for our profligate government's excesses.

Here's what HHS said about the program's issues.

"Leslie Norwalk, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the Kaiser Foundation forum yesterday that the Medicare program itself suffered some of the same growing pains when it began 40 years ago. "We probably have a stack over a foot long of newspaper articles between 1965 and 1966 that read almost identical to the articles we see on the front page of every paper today about the difficulty of implementation and confusion and so forth," Norwalk said."

Ms. Norwalk, does that mean you learned nothing in the last 40 years?

What does this mean for you?

As presently constructed, Part D is a loser - for insurers, tax payers, and so far for beneficiaries. It has a fundamental flaw - the only people who will sign up are those who will gain more financially then they will pay in premiums. In fact, the more "successful" CMS and friends are at getting enrollees (up to Bob's 70% number) the more money the program will lose.

What a great country.