Amid all the hullabaloo over who was asleep at the switch prior to 9/11, what looks like a true scandal in the nation’s capital deserves more attention.
While Republicans and Democrats alike were demanding that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly before the 9/11 commission, a similar clash has been playing out between the White House and the House Ways and Means Committee. That panel is digging into evidence that the White House knowingly misled Congress about the cost of the Medicare prescription drug bill that narrowly passed late last year.
While the Bush administration insisted the cost was $395 billion over 10 years, it was being told by the chief actuary for Medicare, Richard Foster, that the price tag was really much higher — somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion. Knowing that such a projection would doom a bill it wanted badly, the administration appears to have muzzled Foster, knowingly withholding crucial and credible information from Congress.
In the end, the bill passed the House with just two votes to spare, and only after the vote was held open against House rules and several arms were twisted painfully. And just weeks after its passage, lo and behold, the White House revised its cost estimate to $534 billion — a whopping 35 percent increase.
The entire amount will just be heaped onto an already obscene deficit.
So now the Ways and Means Committee wants to interview the president’s chief health-care adviser, Doug Badger, and Thomas Scully, who reportedly threatened to fire Foster if he shared his higher cost projections with Congress. Did Scully really do that? If so, was it at the behest of the White House, through Badger?
The Bush administration doesn’t want you to know. It has refused to let Badger testify, despite the demands of members of its own party. Scully, who left government work to become a lobbyist, also is declining to testify, and Democrats are angry that the committee chairman isn’t forcing the issue.
The smell of cover-up is all over this case, and it must be investigated fully. If the possible exaggeration of intelligence regarding Iraq put the administration’s credibility in doubt, the allegations in this case — if true — would obliterate it. The Medicare actuary’s job is to forecast program costs, and the American people must know whether his best estimates were knowingly withheld for political gain.
Leaders in Congress, particularly fiscally conservative Republicans, should demand a full accounting, and insist that Badger testify. They’re the ones who provided the deciding votes on the Medicare bill. If anyone was hoodwinked — besides the American taxpayer — it was them.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
