From CNN.com yesterday, The Medicare mess: The Medicare bill backfires on the GOP

George Bush and his G.O.P. allies in Congress thought the Medicare prescription-drug benefit they enacted last December would take a key issue away from the Democrats and entice millions of seniors to vote Republican this November.

Instead, the legislation is fast becoming "an albatross around our necks," a G.O.P. Congressman tells TIME. "It's not playing very well with seniors."

Surveys indicate that the elderly are confused about the complicated prescription-drug benefits -- which don't fully kick in until 2006 --i n the nearly 700-page law and are skeptical that drug costs will be lowered.

Now questions about how the bill was pushed through Congress could make them even more leery. The House Ethics Committee and the FBI launched investigations into whether G.O.P. members of the House offered fellow Republican Nick Smith of Michigan a bribe -- in the form of a hefty contribution to his son's congressional campaign -- to vote for the measure on November 22.

And the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began a probe into charges by Richard Foster, Medicare's top cost analyst, that the program's then administrator, Thomas Scully, threatened to fire him last June if he told Congress the prescription-drug bill would cost more than $500 billion, well above the $400 billion the Administration had publicly acknowledged. The higher number wasn't released until after the vote. (Scully denies making the threat.)