The Hightower Report

---

SUBSIDIZING DRUG-COMPANY GOUGING

Step right up, seniors, for it's time to play Medicare Gotcha!

As you know, the drug companies have been ripping off us consumers, charging exorbitant prices in the U.S. for medicines they sell elsewhere for half or even a third as much. Because of public outrage over this gouging, Bush and his Congress had to look like they were doing something, so last year they rammed into law the "Medicare drug discount program" for senior citizens.

The program, which starts in June, is a bedazzling, convoluted, privatized shell game rigged with enough trickery to make a county fair flimflammer blush. Start with the fact that, rather than simply stopping the price gouging, as other countries have done, Bush's program subsidizes it, putting some $139 billion of our tax money into the pockets of the drug giants each year.

Then there's the corporate hucksterism built into the new system. If you think phone-company come-ons are confusing, wait'll you try to compare the dizzying array of private drug-discount plans that'll fill your mailbox. Pharmacy chains, drug companies, insurance peddlers, online firms, and others will try to lure you into taking their card. They'll all offer different enrollment fees, different discounts on their list of drugs, and different lists of drugs that they cover.

Not only will each company have its own price list, but – grab your wallet! – their prices can change weekly. Yes, this means that a company can hook you into taking its card by offering low prices on the medicines you use most often, then – Gotcha! – jack up its prices the next week.

Well, you say, if they do that, I'll switch companies. Gotcha again! Bush's law only lets you switch cards once a year.

Getting the medicines you need ought to not be a game, much less one rigged to enrich drug industry rip-off artists. It's time for a national health plan based on people's needs, not drug-company profits.

---

PENTAGON CONSIDERS GLOBAL-WARMING REALITY

If George W. keeps telling us that global warming is not happening, and that, even if it is, it's nothing to worry about, why are his Pentagon planners warning that "there is substantial evidence that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century," that this could lead to "an abrupt climate change," and that this change could "destabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war"?

Perhaps the disparity between BushThink and the thinking of the Pentagon planners is that the planners actually have to deal in some reality – whereas George can simply stick oil money in his campaign pockets and stick his head in the sand on a rising threat that could be globally catastrophic.

The Pentagon's warning comes in a report titled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." Andrew Marshall, a longtime, highly regarded official who heads the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment, commissioned it. Marshall, who has worked under five presidents, is known as the "Yoda" of the Pentagon. As a DOD spokesman notes, "He's the wise one that, when we need to think about big things, he's the one we turn to."

Nothing is much bigger than global warming, for if it is happening (and practically every independent scientist says it is), it will change everything. The Pentagon's analysis included the possibilities of intense winter storms in the Northeast, an inland sea enveloping part of Northern California, extended drought in crucial agricultural regions, food shortages, lack of fresh water, and energy shortages. It notes that nations with food and water resources may build fortresses around them to stave off have-not nations clamoring for survival.

The report does not say that all of this will happen, but that such a scenario is plausible and that the risk of global warming "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern."

Now, someone read that to George W.