I have to admit, the Bush administration has been playing the politics of this one better than I expected. Sure, it’s an intellectually dishonest approach, but politically, I think this might work.
Shortly after the White House rammed its Medicare bill through Congress, the administration came clean and admitted that its $400 billion program will actually cost $551 billion. Last week, the controversy took a startling turn when reports surfaced that a Medicare official who knew the truth all along was threatened with dismissal if he came forward.
Oddly enough, no one at HHS or the White House denies what took place. Instead, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced that he was launching a formal inquiry to determine what, exactly, happened.
Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, ordered an internal investigation on Tuesday into accusations that the Bush administration had threatened to fire a top Medicare official if he gave data to Congress showing the high cost of the legislation that created prescription drug benefits for the elderly.
“There seems to be a cloud over this department because of this,” Mr. Thompson said. “We have nothing to hide. So I want to make darn sure that everything comes out.”
The White House, oddly enough, announced its support for the investigation this morning.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan endorsed plans by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson to look into the matter. “Obviously it’s a serious allegation,” McClellan said.
The administration’s support for an inquiry may help take some of the heat off, but will the investigation get to the root of the problem?
Supporting an investigation, unfortunately, offers the administration a rhetorical out to further scrutiny. Any questions Scott McClellan might receive, for example, about how terribly misleading all of the administration’s cost estimates were can be dealt with by McClellan saying, “The matter is under investigation, which the White House supports, and we’ll wait to see what the conclusion of that inquiry is.”
That’ll be the spin, but it won’t solve the problem.
Part of this is yet another “what did the White House know and when did they know it” controversy. The administration had all of these cost estimates, knowing full-well that anything over $400 billion would doom the bill in Congress. Are we to believe that the higher estimates, widely known throughout the administration, were a total mystery to Thompson when he was lobbying lawmakers on the House floor?
The inquiry into whether Richard Foster was told to withhold cost estimates from Congress will address an outrageous part of this controversy, but it may not fully explain how the White House successfully duped Congress with a price tag at least some people in the administration knew was false.
After all, as the Washington Post reported in January:
Bush administration officials had indications for months that the new Medicare prescription drug law might cost considerably more than the $400 billion advertised by the White House and Congress, according to internal documents and sources familiar with the issue.
The president’s top health advisers gathered such evidence and shared it with select lawmakers, congressional and other sources said, long before the White House disclosed [Jan. 29] that it believes the program will cost $534 billion over the next decade — one-third more than the estimate widely used when Congress enacted the measure in November.
If this were, say, 1997, we’d have these “top health advisers” to the president under oath, talking about what numbers were shared with whom. We’d also have subpoenas going out to check their memos, phone records, emails, etc.
And if the administration was aware of the deception for a lot longer than they’re letting on, why not allow Congress to revisit the legislation before it’s implemented?
The White House and congressional Republicans on Saturday rejected Democratic demands that Congress reconsider the landmark Medicare prescription legislation approved last year.
[…]
“The president must be held to account for this deception,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “This administration is showing again and again that its word cannot be trusted.”
Kennedy and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) sent Bush a letter Friday, asking him, in essence, when he knew that his administration’s cost estimate was higher than that of the Congressional Budget Office, and why he did not disclose the higher estimate to lawmakers before they voted on the prescription drug bill.
Under the circumstances, and in light of the many scandals surrounding Bush’s Medicare scam, it’s not unreasonable to allow Congress to reopen debate. Sure, it already passed Congress, but that was before lawmakers had reliable information on which to base their votes.
It’s certainly not too late to allow the House and Senate another opportunity to consider the merits of the legislation now that more information is available. Surely the White House wouldn’t want such a sweeping and expensive program being implemented under false pretenses, right?