Mean ol' President Bush wouldn't budge on the deadline for seniors to sign up for Medicare Part D -- the new prescription-drug benefit.

Those who missed last month's cutoff will pay a penalty of 1% for each month they are late.

Seniors who don't sign up until the next enrollment period in November will pay premiums 7% higher as a result unless they qualify as low income, in which case they pay no penalty.

Not many people will pay these penalties. The Bush administration reports that 90% of those eligible made the deadline, and half of those who didn't fall into the low-income category.

And it's hard to blame the administration for sticking to the deadline. You can't wait until you have a claim to buy insurance.

There is much to be said for sticking to the rules to which Congress and the administration agreed when the program was designed.

Give in by rolling back the deadlines, and we can expect a raft of other exceptions. Already, the Senate is on record as supporting legislation to repeal the "noninterference clause" of Part D.

In fact, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has announced that if her party wins a majority in this fall's elections, it will immediately transform Part D to allow government interference -- i.e., price controls.

This would be a disaster.

Currently, the noninterference provision holds that the government may not interfere with price negotiations between private drug plans and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The feds can't set prices, nor can they institute a formulary that determines which medicines can be purchased.

Striking the noninterference clause would cause irreparable damage to our nation's health care system.

And this damage would affect everyone, not just seniors. It would vastly increase government intrusion into the prescription-drug market.

Worse, seniors likely would lose access to the life-saving medicines they need.

Medicare-eligible seniors are the largest part of the American drug market.

They consume almost half of all drugs sold in this country. So instituting price controls for them is tantamount to instituting price controls nationwide.

Government has neither the right information nor the right incentives to make the proper trade-off between prices and profits required to motivate investment in research and development.

Drug prices reflect the risky investments in research and development -- about $800 million per drug -- that companies make to bring these products to market. The market accounts for these costs; governments can't.

The difference is literally a matter of life and death.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut's Center for Healthcare and Insurance Studies found that, since 1960, government interference in drug pricing caused $188 billion in lost spending on research and development.

The "lost" medicines that could have been developed with that money could have saved 140 million life years.

The researchers also found that, should the noninterference clause be repealed, R&D spending could drop by almost 40%, producing a loss of 277 million life years. We'll never know if those lost drugs could have cured cancer, AIDS or Alzheimer's disease.

Some drugs never make it to the market because of price controls. Some drugs do make it, but their arrival is delayed by years or even decades while governments haggle and firms hold out for an acceptable price.

Of course, as patients wait, their conditions worsen and their treatment costs climb -- further negating the "savings" we're promised from government price controls.

And what about those savings? That is the argument for price controls, right?

Yet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and CMS' own actuaries have estimated that a centralized drug benefit, with government price negotiation, would not yield lower drug costs compared to current law.

In fact, CBO estimated that striking the noninterference clause would increase the drug bill's cost to taxpayers by $18 billion between 2003 and 2012.

Competition controls costs and provides choice. Allowing dozens of companies to compete for seniors' business gives those companies an incentive to negotiate better prices and enhance R&D.

This doesn't compute for price-control advocates. They point to the "success" of the Veterans Affairs Department's drug plan. That's the plan in which only 19% of the drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 are listed.

The top-selling Lipitor, a statin that lowers risk of heart attacks and strokes, isn't even on the list.

Veterans are paying for price control with their lives. May the rest of us be spared this mindless intervention.