Utah health officials and elderly and disabled folks gathered at senior citizen centers in the Salt Lake Valley Tuesday weren't buying former Gov. Mike Leavitt's pitch for the changes in Medicare and its new drug benefit.

It didn't matter that the messenger was a former popular governor gone to Washington to do his president's bidding, now as secretary of Health and Human Services. The message he took on the road got a chilly hearing. And for good reason.

Utah Health Department Director David Sundwall told Leavitt that a change in the way prescriptions are covered for Utahns who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid will cost Utah $13 million, despite the federal government's promise that the states will save millions.

Under the new Medicare law, the federal government will pay the drug costs for citizens who are "dually eligible" for both Medicare and Medicaid. States had been paying for the drugs under Medicaid, and now those citizens will be covered under the Medicare drug benefit. But with a hefty string attached.

States are required to repay the federal government 90 percent of the drug bill for that group in 2006, with the percentage eventually dropping to 75 percent.

Leavitt said he doubted that states would lose money. Then he tried to convince the disabled in his audience that the state will somehow cover their increased co-payments on medicines for Medicaid patients.

Seniors were concerned that the private-sector providers that will administer the plan will go broke under the weight of the demand for expensive drugs, just as they did under previous privatization plans. Leavitt dodged that question and another about low reimbursement rates that have prompted some doctors to reject Medicare patients.

The fact is, the Medicare reform bill pushed through Congress by the Bush administration amounts to a huge transfer of money from taxpayers to insurance companies and drug makers under the guise of a benefit for the elderly.

Taxpayers will subsidize the program to the tune of $400 billion over the next decade and will pay trillions more as the number of retirees balloons. That is because the law prevents the federal government from setting caps on what it will pay drug companies, and even disallows bargaining for lower prices.

The medicine Leavitt is offering to justly skeptical Utahns is nearly as unproven as the products hawked from the back of a wagon more than 100 years ago. But it's a lot more expensive.