AMAZING! Bush: legal to lie to congress re Medicare costs

Posted on Thu, Apr. 01, 2004
Medicare officials say masking cost estimates was legal
By Tony Pugh
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials insisted Thursday that they acted legally in ordering the nation's top Medicare cost analyst to keep from lawmakers his estimate that the new Medicare prescription drug benefit might cost more than $100 billion over what Congress was willing to pay.

Former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully, now a health-care lobbyist, declined to appear before the House Ways and Means Committee to defend himself. But Scully, in written testimony, made a simple case:

Richard Foster, chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, felt, according to Scully, that "he was free to make decisions about when or how to respond to congressional inquiries relating to cost estimates generally, and, in particular, the Medicare Reform bill."

"Simply put, I disagreed," Scully wrote, "and there is no question whatsoever that I made it very clear to Mr. Foster, both directly and indirectly, that I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."

Scully did not address Foster's assertion that he threatened to fire the actuary if Foster shared his data with lawmakers, which Knight Ridder irst reported on March 11. Foster's estimate, selectively shared with members of the Bush administration, indicated that the Medicare prescription drug benefit could cost over $500 billion in its first ten years, far above the $395 billion figure lawmakers were using.

If made public, the higher estimates would have jeopardized passage of the White House-backed prescription drug benefit, since 13 GOP House members had drawn the line at $400 billion. The bill initially passed the House by one vote. A House-Senate compromise later passed by five.

While Scully's gag order may have been legal, Democrats say it was unethical and forced them to vote on the measure without a full understanding of the bill and without a full debate on its merits.

Prior to Scully's arrival at Medicare in May 2001, Foster generally honored lawmakers' requests for his figures. Shortly before the first House vote on June 27, 2003, however, Scully ordered Foster to withhold his numbers.

Scully's top aide, Richard Flick, now the agency's San Francisco regional administrator, testified Thursday that he e-mailed Foster on June 20 on Scully's behalf. The e-mail states that Democratic requests for cost estimates should be shared "with Tom Scully only. NO ONE ELSE. ... the consequences for insubordination are extremely severe."

Flick said Scully ordered Foster to suppress the information, in part, because some of the data involved provisions that were no longer in the bill.

Leslie Norwalk, acting deputy Medicare administrator, testified that she'd told Foster on June 13 that he was not legally required to provide "internal Executive Branch information to Congress." Norwalk, an attorney, said lawyers in the Health and Human Services Department of which the Medicare agency is a part, agreed with her interpretation.

Ways and Means Committee Democrats disagree, but they're outnumbered. The committee's Republicans on Thursday tabled motions by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NY, to subpoena for testimony Scully and White House health policy adviser Doug Badger, who had received Foster's estimates and may have shared them.

Committee chairman William Thomas, D-Calif, said that he would consider subpoenas if the committee were "in pursuit of a legal need." Thomas said he would not seek subpoenas to get information that members wanted only out of curiosity.

"There was a cover-up of this information and we want to know how high up the cover-up went," Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., blasted back.

In a related development, the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, will be looking into the matter, spokesman Jeff Nelligan said. Its probe will be conducted jointly with the Health and Human Services Department's Inspector General, the agency's independent investigators.