The White House released budget figures yesterday indicating that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit will cost more than $1.2 trillion in the coming decade, a much higher price tag than President Bush suggested when he narrowly won passage of the law in late 2003....Beginning with his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush pledged to keep the total cost of the drug benefit to $400 billion over 10 years. An estimate by the Congressional Budget Office [$395 billion] was close to Bush's figure. But shortly after Bush signed the program into law in December 2003, the White House revised its projection to $534 billion, [and] it never offered a detailed breakdown of that estimate....
The most significant change, [Medicare chief Mark McClellan] said, is that the new budget projections tally the cost of drug benefits for 10 years. Projections made in 2003 included the two transition years before the drug coverage is fully implemented in 2006. [In other words, even the deceptive cost estimate given to congress was for 2004-2013, not 2006-2015 -- when the new entitlement was scheduled to begin.]
--Washington Post, 09 February 2005