Rx reform bill: Medicare expert says he was told to withhold true cost info.

As reported in a copyrighted story in The Philadelphia Inquirer today, the Medicare program's top actuary -- traditionally a nonpartisan expert whose numbers are freely accessible by legislators on both sides of the aisle -- claims that he was ordered during last fall's debate not to reveal the true cost estimates for the Bush Administration's Medicare reform bill's prescription drug benefit or he would lose his job. Apart from whether Richard Foster will be a candidate for one of Kennedy Library Foundation's Profiles in Courage awards, this story -- if true -- is yet another example of the extent to which this Adminstration will distort the facts to achieve its political goals. Tom Scully, the head of the Medicare agency at the time, denies that he threatened or squelched Foster, but as the article points out, his boss, DHHS Tommy Thompson all but admitted Scully stepped over the line in Congressional testimony last month:

"I may have been derelict in allowing my administrator, Tom Scully, to have more control over it than I should have," Thompson said. "... And maybe he micromanaged the actuary and the actuary services too much... . I can assure you that from now [on], the remaining days that I am secretary you will have as much access as you want to anybody or anything in the department. All you have to do is call me."

Liz Fowler, Ph.D., chief health counsel for Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, believes Thompson, saying of Tom Scully: "He's a liar."

It's not as if the politicos in past administrations haven't bent the truth and concealed unpleasant facts when they pitched their legislative packages to the Hill. That's what lobbyists do: they spin. But Congress enjoys certain traditions and relationships with sources of information that have to be counted upon for nonpartisan, factual testimony and reports: the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accounting Office, the intelligence agencies, and CMS' actuarial office. These are human institutions and they sometimes fall short of the ideal of objective, truth-seeking purveyors of the truth-as-we-know-it. But when their message is deliberately distorted, when inconvenient facts are deep-sixed and more convenient fictions are inserted in their place, Congress has a right to be outraged. So do we all, because representative democracy is threatened by lawless demagoguery. In the case of this story, the result is a Medicare bill that is seriously flawed, bloated, and unaffordable. Other policy failures in other realms are heart-breakingly apparent. Mistakes happen, but it's hard to forgive them when it is so abundantly apparent that this administration disrespects and dishonors both the facts and the process.