What a difference markets make. And too bad for seniors that most Democrats are so obsessed with badmouthing the recently passed Medicare prescription-drug bill they don’t have time to educate their constituents about how the new law provides lower-priced medicines–lower every week, in fact.

That’s right. Owing to the introduction of competition and market forces, largely unheralded and underreported in the Medicare legislation passed last year, prices paid by most seniors for prescription drugs are dropping and may even go lower–if they enrolled in the recently announced prescription-drug card created by the Medicare bill. And it’s all thanks to the impact of competition.

The Department of Health and Human Services recently approved 73 discount cards offered by a variety of private providers. In every state, seniors can purchase a discount card for an annual fee of $30 (or less in many instances). These sponsor companies use their bulk-purchasing power to extract the most favorable rates from drug makers, and pass on the lower costs to their members. Lower-income seniors can qualify for a $600 credit on medicines annually.

But here’s the interesting twist. Unlike a one-size-fits-all model proposed by many on the Left, these companies have to post prices on a website. They started doing so a few weeks ago. And guess what happened when companies started seeing what others charged for say, Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering drug? Senator Kennedy may claim it’s all a vast capitalist conspiracy–but prices went down.

“In the two weeks since the enrollment period for the discount cards began, we have already seen market forces at work to significantly lower drug costs for seniors,” Republican Congressman Bill Thomas of California, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said at a press conference last week.

He’s right. According to the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), brand-name medicines dropped 11.5 percent on average in one week as drug-card sponsors compared prices. An industry trade publication reports that CVS’s myPharmaCare card went from listing one of the highest prices on Lilly’s market-leading Zyprexa (an antipsychotic drug) to the lowest in its category when it cut the cost by nine percent in just a few days.

And seniors will realize even more savings down the road. “The dropping drug prices are one thing,” Congresswoman Nancy Johnson of Connecticut told me in an interview this week. “But soon the drug-card issuers are going to compete over the number of medicines they cover and the price they charge for the card, producing even more savings.”

For their part, Democrats are hysterical about the prospects of a market-oriented health-policy success story. Never deterred by sacrificing seniors’ health on the altar of partisan politics, Congressman Robert Matsui, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the political arm of the House Democrats, recently sent a missive to his colleagues and allies among labor unions and other liberal-oriented groups arguing how and why they will not let Republicans “take the issue away from Democrats and…allow GOP candidates to run on prescription drugs in the election.” Well, that’s fine, but whatever happened to making medicines cheaper for the elderly?

Unfortunately it’s all politics, Aunt Prudence. Democrats are engaged in a ferocious public-relations duel to discredit, distort, and deny the benefits of the bill. They will do whatever it takes to deny the Republicans a victory.

But politics is only part of the equation–ideology is the other. Most Democrats vigorously oppose market-oriented principles in health care. Markets, competition, and a role for the private sector are all anathema to devotees of government-run systems, such as the Canadian model or Hillary-care. Yet these conservative principles work in health care just as they do in other markets, and it scares liberals to death that choice, responsibility, and competition might actually work.

–Gary Andres is vice chairman of policy and research at the Dutko Group Companies in Washington D.C. and holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Illinois–Chicago.