• Candor, a firing offense Candor, a firing offense Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services, is shocked — shocked! — over allegations that some one on his staff hid $155 billion in Medicare costs from Congress. He has
• Candor, a firing offense
Candor, a firing offense
Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services, is shocked — shocked! — over allegations that some one on his staff hid $155 billion in Medicare costs from Congress.
He has ordered an investigation into whether a subordinate threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he spilled the beans to Congress.
It’s a neat move.
It deflects blame downstairs to a bureaucrat who no longer works for government.
It obscures the real scandal here: Thompson’s department and the White House lied by omission — at great cost to tomorrow’s taxpayers.
They let Congress believe that it was voting on a $400 billion Medicare drug benefit, while the administration sat on figures showing that the likely cost would be $551 billion.
Thompson pleads ignorance — an inspiring quality in a cabinet secretary. He says he knew the cost would be higher than Congress expected, but he didn’t have a final figure until after the vote.
If that’s true, Thompson should plead incompetence, too. Medicare actuary Richard S. Foster shared his estimates widely with high officials in Thompson’s department months before the vote in Congress. Thompson’s I-didn’t-get-the-memo excuse strains credibility.
It seems that lots of memos got lost in the mail. Before the vote in Congress, actuary Foster sent his figures to the White House and the Office of Management and the Budget. Surely, if they’d read their mail, the White House and OMB would have clued-in Congress. Right?
The Medicare drug benefit was the top domestic priority of the Bush Administration. It was one of the president’s major campaign promises. And it was in danger of defeat last fall, in part because congressional conservatives believed it was much too costly.
So, we conclude that administration officials who knew the real cost must have been snoozing on the November night when Republican leaders in the House delayed voting for three hours while they scrounged for the votes to pass the drug benefit. Bush was certainly awake. He was on the phone twisting arms until Congress looked like a contortionists’ convention. The higher price tag must have slipped his mind. Or, perhaps he didn’t get the memo.
Foster, the actuary, was quite willing to chat about his estimate. In fact, members of Congress were asking him for numbers. But he says he was ordered to keep his mouth shut by his boss, Medicare administrator Thomas A. Scully. Foster says he was told that “the consequences of insubordination would be very severe,” according to the New York Times. A congressional aide who was pressing for the information says Mr. Scully told her that if Foster released the data, “I’ll fire him so fast his head will spin.” Scully denies the remark.
Now, Thompson has ordered his inspector general to probe Foster’s allegations. Scully, a former hospital lobbyist, is beyond harm these days, since he resigned from government in December. In fact, while still working for the government on the Medicare bill, he was negotiating a job with Washington law firms that do Medicare work for private business. The concept of conflict-of-interest is alien to this administration.
So we’d expect that, if Foster’s charges are verified, we’ll hear a bit of cluck-clucking from Thompson about the difficulty of finding good help these days, and that will be the end of it.
But the damage done is real. If Congress had known the true cost of the drug benefits, it might have killed the bill. Or, it might have dropped the provisions that make it a give-away to the drug industry.
The victim of this deception is the taxpayer.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
