Dems Want Bush to Explain Medicare Cost Discrepancies

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee have effectively put an end to demands by Democrats to investigate charges against the Bush administration for withholding from Congress the true cost figures for the historic Medicare reform legislation, known as the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA).

On the floor of the Senate last month, Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) quoted extensively from a report that appeared in the Miami Herald stating that the administration withheld cost estimates for the Medicare bill that were upward of $100 billion more than the $395 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill to cost in the first 10 years.

The story, picked up by other press outlets, cited an e-mail from the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to colleagues stating that he was under threat of being fired if he released the higher estimates.

In response, Democrats on the Ways and Means committee had asked former CMS director Thomas Scully and White House aide Doug Badger to answer questions about when President Bush and other officials learned that prescription drug benefits included in the bill would cost about $150 billion more than Bush said he wanted to spend and why lawmakers were not given that information.

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales explained in a letter to committee chair Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) that Badger would not appear before the committee because of “long-standing White House policy” against having White House staff testify before Congress.

The charges, however, are still being investigated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while Democrats have requested civil and criminal probes, according to a report in the April 2 Los Angeles Times.

At the time of debate on the bill, a number of conservative House Republicans were vowing to vote against the bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

“I think this is one of the most reprehensible actions that I have seen since coming to Congress,” Daschle said on the Senate floor. “I think we ought to bring this bill back for another vote. I think the House and the Senate deserve to have a vote based on all of the information, not just part of it. If this and perhaps other information was withheld, members of Congress were called to vote under false pretenses. They were called to vote without having the truth. On an issue with these repercussions, we have no other choice but to re-vote this issue. . . .

“As close as that vote was, in the dead of night, I think we owe it to the American people, we owe it to seniors, to reconsider these votes and question whether or not we can put in place some absolute guarantee that this will never happen again.”

In a letter to President Bush, Daschle and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked President Bush to answer questions about the allegations.

“It is well known that the administration’s legislative strategy was developed by a high-level White House task force including the secretary of HHS, the director of the National Economic Council, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, special assistants to the president, and the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” the senators wrote.

“It is inconceivable that this high-level group was not well informed about the actuary’s cost estimate of the bill and the various policy alternatives considered during the course of negotiations with Congress. . . . Congress relied on those representations even while your administration’s internal estimates viewed them as erroneous.” ▪