George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson have been saying that they only learned that CMS thought that last year's Medicare bill would be much more expensive at Christmastide, and that this information had been kept from them--and from Congress--for six months by rogue CMS administrator Tom Scully. They say that they were shocked! shocked! when they found out what was going on, and that Scully was then "chastised by his superiors" for misbehavior.
Now it emerges that Scully was chastised--but not for misbehavior in keeping CMS analyses secret from Congress. It emerges that he was chastised by White House Special Assistant to the President Doug Badger for failing to keep CMS analyses secret enough from Congress.
The fact that Doug Badger was not fired last Christmastide is sufficient to prove that he was carrying out Bush's and Thompson's policies, and acting with their blessing.
Here Amy Goldstein of the Washington Post tells the story in much more tentative and hypothetical a mode than my sources told it to me:
washingtonpost.com: Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data: Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last year if he disclosed too much information to Congress, said last night that he believes the White House participated in the decision to withhold analyses that Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be far more expensive than lawmakers knew. Foster... was warned repeatedly by his former boss, Thomas A. Scully, the Medicare administrator... that he would be dismissed if he replied... to legislative requests for information.... Foster... understood Scully to be acting at times on White House instructions, probably coming from Bush's senior health policy adviser.... "I just remember Tom being upset, saying he was caught in the middle. It was like he was getting dumped on," Foster said.
Foster added that he believed... Scully had been referring to Doug Badger... the White House official most steeped in the administration's negotiations with Congress over Medicare legislation enacted late last year and because Badger was intimately familiar with the analyses his office produced.
The account by Foster, a longtime civil servant who has been the Medicare program's chief actuary for nine years, diverges sharply from the explanations of why cost estimates were withheld that were given this week by White House spokesmen and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. They suggested that Scully... had acted unilaterally and that he was chastised by his superiors when they learned of the blocked information and the threat.... Thompson told reporters: "Tom Scully was running this. Tom Scully was making those decisions." Thompson said the administration did not have final cost estimates until late December predicting that the law would cost $534 billion over 10 years, $139 billion more than the Congressional Budget Office's prediction. Foster has said his own analyses as early as last spring showed that the legislation's cost would exceed $500 billion.
Last night, White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said, "It is my understanding that Mr. Badger did not in any way ask anyone to withhold information from Congress or pressure anyone to do the same." Duffy said he asked Badger this week whether he had done so and that Badger replied he had not. Duffy said that Badger was traveling last night and was unreachable...
Of course, Special Assistants to the President are *never* unreachable. Part of their job description is that they are always reachable by the High Politicians. That's one lie. I wonder if there's another. Duffy says that Badger did not ask anyone to withhold information, but did Badger ask Scully to make sure that Foster withheld information?
Posted by DeLong at March 19, 2004 02:48 PM | TrackBack
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/18/politics/18MEDI.html
Mysterious Fax Adds to Intrigue Over the Medicare Bill's Cost
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — Late one Friday afternoon in January, after the House of Representatives had adjourned for the week, Cybele Bjorklund, a House Democratic health policy aide, heard the buzz of the fax machine at her desk. Coming over the transom, with no hint of the sender, was a document she had been seeking for months: an estimate by Medicare's chief actuary showing the cost of prescription drug benefits for the elderly.
Dated June 11, 2003, the document put the cost at $551.5 billion over 10 years. It appeared to confirm what Ms. Bjorklund and her bosses on the House Ways and Means Committee had long suspected: the actuary, Richard S. Foster, had concluded the legislation would be far more expensive than Congress's $400 billion estimate — and had kept quiet while lawmakers voted on the bill and President Bush signed it into law.
Ms. Bjorklund had been pressing Mr. Foster for his numbers since June. When he refused, telling her he could be fired, she said, she confronted his boss, Thomas A. Scully, then the Medicare administrator. "If Rick Foster gives that to you," Ms. Bjorklund remembered Mr. Scully telling her, "I'll fire him so fast his head will spin." Mr. Scully denies making such threats.
These conversations among three government employees — an obscure Congressional aide, a little-known actuary and a high-level official — remained secret until now, and Ms. Bjorklund still does not know who sent the fax. But Mr. Foster went public last week, and details of his struggle for independence within the Bush administration are now emerging, raising questions about whether the White House intentionally withheld crucial data from lawmakers....
Posted by: anne on March 19, 2004 02:56 PMWhat everyone seems to be ignoring is the process at OMB, which by the beginning of December needed to know because the Bush FY05 budget was being readied for the printer. OMB Director Josh Bolten had to know and either he decided to take a bullet for the team or (and much more likely) passed the information to Rove and friends in the White House so they could prepare for the inevitable political firestorm. No one should think this stopped at Scully, or Thompson. That's not the way it works.
Posted by: budget wonk on March 19, 2004 03:05 PMI'm sure budget wonk is quite correct about the trail of awareness of this subterfuge within the administration. Is there a recent precedent for this sort of misrepresentation to representatives?
Posted by: David on March 19, 2004 04:20 PMI seem to recall that Greg Mankiw was unavailable to comment on the forecast the day it was produced. That would seem to confirm that he knew it was bogus and not just out-dated. He wasn't inclined to lie for his masters.
Posted by: Dan Ryan on March 19, 2004 04:37 PMWhom the gods would destroy, they first give a Bush administration.
Posted by: dave on March 19, 2004 07:19 PMSomeone on Wash Week this evening said she'd been told that the threats to Foster were quite in keeping with the management style Scully has, FWIW.
Posted by: Linkmeister on March 19, 2004 11:51 PMNobody was fooled.
Reports from analysts consistently pointed out the cost would skyrocket, and they are no doubt still underestimated. American taxpayers simply chose to ignore the obvious because they liketo see their jobs move overseas.
Posted by: Matt Young on March 20, 2004 07:06 AMMatt, that's not the case: at least some GOP members were fooled, and really convinced themselves that this monstrosity of a bill would be okay as long as it cost less than $400B....
Posted by: howard on March 20, 2004 09:07 AMhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/politics/20MEDI.html
Medicare Actuary Gives Wanted Data to Congress
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary of Medicare, provided Congress with documents on Friday showing that federal payments to private health insurance plans under a new Medicare law could far exceed what Congress assumed when it passed the measure last fall.
For months, lawmakers had been seeking the data, but Mr. Foster said in an interview that he had withheld it under instructions from Bush administration officials.
He turned over documents outlining the information at a meeting on Friday with Congressional aides of both parties who work on health legislation.
The documents estimate that the new law will increase Medicare payments to private health plans by a total of $46 billion over the next 10 years, not the $14 billion assumed by lawmakers when they voted on the legislation. Mr. Foster had cited the discrepancy in an interview earlier this week, but the documents he turned over on Friday, Mr. Foster said, show that the Bush administration was aware of the gap well before Congress approved the new law.
Moreover, the documents show that the administration expects a huge increase in the number of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in various types of managed care. About 12 percent of the 41 million current Medicare beneficiaries are in such private health plans today. By 2009, Mr. Foster says, the proportion will reach 32 percent, equally divided between health maintenance organizations and preferred provider organizations.
By contrast, the actuary estimates that enrollment in the traditional government-run Medicare program will decline from 2006 to 2009, along with payments to many health care providers....
Posted by: anne on March 20, 2004 09:13 AM"at least some GOP members were fooled"
Yes, Republicans are a stupid group.
Posted by: Matt Young on March 20, 2004 10:04 AMhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/opinion/20SAT4.html
Reporting Live, Outside Credibility
In a foolhardy obsession, the Bush administration continues to insist that a woman it used to portray a television reporter is actually a freelance journalist, not an actor. The woman appears in free videos distributed to local TV stations by the Health and Human Services Department. The videos, which many stations used, are plugs for the controversial new drug program the White House is selling to elderly voters. But the videos pretend to be balanced news accounts, and even end with a facsimile of the tag line delivered by real reporters. "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."
The government insists that Ms. Ryan is the real deal. The Columbia Journalism Review, which put some actual reporters on the case, showed otherwise. Ms. Ryan turns out to be a public relations specialist who in this case was hired to portray a stand-up reporter presenting the Medicare plan as objective news....
Posted by: anne on March 20, 2004 10:20 AMUnderstanding most of your commentators use goverment figures in their work, I wonder after reading your blog for months how the devil you can do any honest work with the lying figures supplied by the government? Of course the Medicare figure was unbelievable and stupid but take the unemployment figures. Drop outs are not counted but everyone goes on like they are working at home as consultants. Or is it we won't be able to compare them to 1980 figures? Is the reason to make sure you can compare them to the past even though in all honesty the integrity of the figures and the story they are to tell is not truthful. Question? Do you ever get to the point where you throw up you hands and say how can I do my job? Or at least what kind of work do these figures produce? Do they show the real picture of thousands and thousands of people who can't find work, but want to work, unemployment insurance has run out and no one has the decency to at least count them? It's like, well, the politicans won't go for a change because the numbers will be too high. I don't care what the politicans think but I do care what you people do and rely on the information you produce.
Posted by: Hal on March 20, 2004 03:44 PMInterestingly enough, Badger graduated with a masters from Westminster Theological Seminary.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/government/badger-bio.html
Wonder if he studied the ninth commandment...
For fine data analysis on employment:
http://www.epinet.org/index.cfm
Persistently weak job growth leads to labor force contraction
The lack of available jobs in the current economy has caused a decline in the number of people either working or seeking work. This labor force contraction is an indication that the job market is far weaker than the 5.6% unemployment rate implies.
Unemployment measures understate job slack
Despite a steady unemployment rate of 5.6%, jobs increased by only 21,000 in February 2004, underscoring the fact that the typical unemployment measures are failing to convey the labor market's current distress. Evidence of this distress is obvious when taking into account both underemployment rates and the number of those who have dropped out of the job market altogether.
Jobs fall behind growth in working-age population
The growth in the working-age population continues to outpace the number of new jobs created each month.
Posted by: anne on March 21, 2004 08:29 AMFor fine budget analysis:
House Budget Committee Process Proposal Would Not Restrain Those Areas of the Budget that Have Contributed Most to the Deficits - 3/18/04
By exempting tax cuts and the "war on terrorism" from controls, the budget process legislation approved by the House Budget Committee on March 17 would not cover budget areas that accounted for about four-fifths of the recent shift from surpluses to deficits.
House Budget Committee Pay-As-You-Go Proposal Would Exempt All Tax Cuts and Make a Mockery of Efforts to Restore Fiscal Discipline - 3/17/04
The House Budget Committee adopted a version of the pay-as-you-go rules that would apply only to entitlement programs and that would exempt all tax cuts from the pay-as-you-go requirements, including the $1.2 trillion cost over ten years of making the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent.
The Local Impact Of Proposed Cuts In Federal Housing Assistance - 3/17/04
These tables show the funding shortfall that each public housing agency in the nation would face under the Administration's proposed cuts in housing assistance, as well as the potential impact on the families each agency serves.
Posted by: anne on March 21, 2004 08:42 AMAs much as the Administration and our representatives hide behind their claims of not having knowledge (medicare costs, WMDs, etc.)the only solution would be to turn out the whole bunch. Anyone who can't see the open lies at the time that they are being told is either too dumb, too ignorant or too conflicted to hold public office. An Administration that can't vet their own facts should be impeached just on the basis of incompetance. Of course incompetance is just a shallow start with this group.
Posted by: TiDo on March 21, 2004 03:23 PMLinkmeister is right. Scully came off in meetings as not someone who "plays well with others," certainly not those at lower levels in sister agencies. However, I would not doubt that the buck did not stop there.
Posted by: Art Nevsky on March 22, 2004 10:44 AM