Let’s review for just a moment. We already know the administration lied to Congress and the public about the cost of the White House Medicare plan. We also know that the Bush administration is refusing to share cost estimates with lawmakers, despite previous promises to do so. We also know that one administration official was threatened with dismissal if he told anyone the truth.
In March, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced he was initiating an internal investigation into what, exactly, happened among Medicare’s top officials. Yesterday, HHS released its report. What a surprise — they’ve concluded they didn’t do anything wrong.
Bush administration officials broke no laws in withholding from Congress estimates of the cost of the new Medicare law, according to an internal investigation made public yesterday.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general, the agency’s internal watchdog, said a three-month investigation found that administration officials had used aggressive tactics to keep from Congress much higher estimates of the legislation’s cost — $100 billion more than what the president and other officials were acknowledging.
But the effort — including threats by Thomas Scully, the administration’s Medicare chief until December, to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster — did not violate federal law, the inspector general said.
There’s so many things wrong with this, it’s hard to know where to start.
The administration was effectively investigating itself. Not surprisingly, HHS has fully exonerated itself. Yet, when independent investigators looked at the same evidence, they came to the opposite conclusion.
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.
House Democrats seized on the nine-page memo yesterday to argue for subpoenas requiring testimony by former Medicare administrator Tom Scully and White House aide Douglas Badger regarding their knowledge of the alleged “gag order.”
Moreover, the HHS report was hardly exculpatory.
An internal investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the top Medicare official threatened to fire the program’s chief actuary if he told Congress that drug benefits would probably cost much more than the White House acknowledged.
A report on the investigation, issued Tuesday, says the administrator of Medicare, Thomas A. Scully, issued the threat to Richard S. Foster while lawmakers were considering huge changes in the program last year. As a result, Mr. Foster’s cost estimate did not become known until after the legislation was enacted.
In fact, as it turns out, Scully blocked Foster from telling the truth on five separate occasions.
Naturally, the administration is anxious to sweep this scandal under the rug.
Bill Pierce, an HHS spokesman, said Tuesday’s report showed the administration acted properly. “We hope that with the release of this report we can put behind us the political squabbling and move on to the important work of implementing the new law,” Pierce said.
No chance, Bill. The CRS believes the law was broken and a GAO report is on the way that may come to the same conclusion. In the meantime, it’s hard to just put the whole thing “behind us,” when the Bush administration still refuses to share information about its Medicare cost estimates and continues to deny the obvious fact that it lied to Congress and the public.
Worse, we still don’t know to what extent the White House was involved with the deception. Foster believes top Bush aides played a role, which is no small matter.
Having the administration investigate and exonerate itself is clearly unsatisfactory. What do you suppose the chances are we can get Ashcroft to name an independent investigator? Don’t answer that; it was a rhetorical question.