How about a little good news, for me anyway? It appears my insurance company is weary of fucking around and has paid out on some of the work I’ve missed due to health issues over the last few weeks. Which means there will be no more blegging until my usual holiday season hit-up. And speaking of money and health, one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong: 1) 9-11, 2) Iraq War, 3) Hurricane Katrina, 4) slow website, and 5) Great Recession. Here’s a helpful hint: all but one happened under the previous administration and most of those ended up costing a trillion taxpayer dollars or more with thousands of lives lost or ruined for good measure.

But you know what is a little more like a slow loading healthcare website, happened under the Bush WH, and has also cost in the neighborhood of a trillion tax-bucks? It’s not web pages that time out, like the WordPress edit screen, Youtube, and pretty much every other site I visit on a daily basis. It’s this blast from the recent past:

Daily Kos –Looking back on it, the public’s turnaround from initial rejection to growing support for Part D was understandable. The unfunded $400 billion program that President Bush signed into law in December 2003 was needlessly complex for seniors and unnecessarily expensive for taxpayers. Rather than having the government negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical firms and add drug coverage into the traditional Medicare program, President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress instead gave recipients subsidies to purchase plans from private insurers.

Making matters worse, millions of “dual eligible” already receiving drug coverage from Medicaid had to switch to the new scheme, a process that left millions unable to pay for their prescriptions for weeks in early 2006. But for tens of millions of American seniors, Part D was better than the alternative: nothing. As the Bush administration’s bureaucratic bungles were ironed out over time (aided in large part by governors who stepped into provide resources, support and cash), public support increased.

There’s another rather relevant contrast: creepy progressive zillionaires didn’t pay off democratic sociopaths to knee-cap Medicare Part D, trick beneficiaries into not using it, or cast those who did as terrorist nazi socialist leeches. But other than all that … they’re virtually identical.