More on Bush's Medicare Plan

"The selling of Bush’s Medicare plan: a case history of political gangsterism"
By Patrick Martin
WSWS

While official Washington was transfixed last week by the televised appearance of current and former top national security officials before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks, another witness was appearing on Capitol Hill to describe a recent instance of the political skullduggery that characterizes the Bush administration.

Richard S. Foster, chief actuary for the Medicare program, testified March 24 before the House Ways and Means Committee about the manner in which officials of the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pressured him to withhold information from Congress concerning the likely cost of the prescription drug benefit that is the centerpiece of the Medicare “reform” bill passed by Congress last fall.

The appearance came two weeks after Foster released estimates that the cost of the Medicare prescription drug plan would be $534 billion over the next ten years, one third more than the $400 billion figure cited by the Bush administration. The White House and HHS knew of the higher cost estimates, he revealed, but kept them quiet in order to win the votes of two dozen conservative Republican congressmen, who would have balked at a more expensive program.

A career federal employee who has spent two decades as an actuary for the Social Security and Medicare programs, Foster is charged by law to provide estimates of the cost of legislative proposals when requested by any member of Congress. Last June, at a critical point in the effort by the Bush administration to push a Medicare prescription drug bill through the House of Representatives, Foster’s boss, HHS official and Medicare chief Thomas Scully, ordered him not to answer requests from Democratic members of the House, and threatened to fire him if he did.

Foster told the congressional committee that he had shared the estimates with a White House official, Doug Badger, Bush’s special assistant for health policy, and that Badger seemed to be directing Scully in imposing the gag. “There’s evidence regarding Mr. Scully’s comments about acting on direct White House orders,” Foster said, without elaborating.

White House officials denied ordering the suppression of information, but they refused to release telephone logs that would show contacts with Foster or Scully during the period in question, citing the confidentiality of executive branch deliberations.

Foster said he felt the gag rule was “inappropriate and, in fact, unethical.” He added, “I felt a very strong responsibility to the general public not to withhold technical information that could be helpful.” He went on to say he had become so frustrated with Scully’s instructions to withhold information from Congress that he decided to resign in protest, but was dissuaded by his own staff.

In response to this testimony, four Senate Democrats sent a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft arguing that White House and HHS officials had violated at least two federal criminal laws. One of these, passed in 1997 law at the insistence of congressional Republicans after a previous conflict with the Clinton administration, stated that the Medicare actuary is legally required to supply Congress with cost estimates prepared on an objective and impartial basis.

Criminal tactics

The suppression of information is only one aspect of a campaign waged by the Bush administration to secure passage of the Medicare legislation, using tactics that can only be characterized as criminal: double bookkeeping, supplying false information under oath, bribery, coercive threats, violations of established congressional rules, and the use of federal funds to finance campaign propaganda.

Overall, the selling of the Medicare legislation resembles the methods employed by Enron and other corporate gangsters, one difference being that instead of enrolling the accountant as a co-conspirator, as Enron did with Arthur Andersen, the Bush administration imposed a gag order on its actuary when his estimates conflicted with their political requirements


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