Everyone’s favorite domestic debacle — Bush’s Medicare scheme — received yet another round of bad news yesterday, when the non-partisan Government Accountability Office said it illegally empowered insurance companies to limit patients’ choice of care.
The Bush administration violated the law by allowing private insurers to limit choices of some patients in a small trial program of managed health care under Medicare, congressional investigators said.
Preferred provider organizations, which offer members a network of discounted health care providers, have enrolled 105,000 Medicare beneficiaries in 19 states.
In some cases, insurers refused to pay claims for home health visits, nursing care, dental work, routine physicals and other services obtained from providers who were not part of the PPO network, the Government Accountability Office said.
“By law, these plans should have been required to cover all services in their benefit packages even if those services were obtained from providers outside the plans’ provider networks,” GAO said.
The administration was wrong to waive the requirement, GAO said.
So Bush stacked the deck for PPOs, and more importantly, got caught. For those keeping score at home, this is the third instance in which independent government researchers have identified illegal aspects of Bush’s Medicare boondoggle. So much for Republicans being the “law and order” party.
The first was the discovery earlier this year that the administration far exceeded its authority by blocking officials at HHS from telling Congress and the public about the true costs of the White House plan.
Nonpartisan congressional analysts said Bush administration officials appear to have violated federal law by barring Medicare’s chief actuary from sharing cost estimates with lawmakers debating prescription-drug legislation.
“Congress’s right to receive truthful information from federal agencies to assist in its legislative functions is clear and unassailable,” said the Congressional Research Service legal analysis, which cites both statutes and related Supreme Court decisions dating back almost a century. “Political gamesmanship must yield to the clear public interest of providing elected representatives in the Congress with accurate and truthful information upon which to effectively fashion the laws for the nation,” it said.
Shortly thereafter, we learned the administration had broken the law in the way in which it used tax dollars to distribute propaganda touting the Medicare plan.
The Bush administration violated two federal laws through part of its publicity campaign to promote changes in Medicare intended to help older Americans afford prescription drugs, the investigative arm of Congress said yesterday.
The General Accounting Office concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services illegally spent federal money on what amounted to covert propaganda by producing videos about the Medicare changes that were made to look like news reports. Portions of the videos, which have been aired by 40 television stations around the country, do not make it clear that the announcers were paid by HHS and were not real reporters.
And now today’s announcement makes three. I guess if we broadened the scope a bit, we could conceivably tie in a fourth crime by noting that GOP House lawmakers, acting at the administration’s behest, illegally tried to bribe a Michigan congressman with $100,000 in exchange for his vote on Bush’s Medicare scheme.
Of course, this only highlights the illegal aspects of the law and doesn’t even begin to touch on the excessive costs, questionable benefits for GOP corporate donors, and the fact that seniors hate the plan. Otherwise, however, it’s a great idea.