...The government's longtime chief analyst of Medicare costs said yesterday that Bush administration officials threatened to fire him last year if he disclosed to Congress that he believed the prescription drug legislation favored by the White House would prove far more expensive than lawmakers had been told.
Bush had said he was willing to spend as much as $400 billion for the drug benefits and other Medicare changes during the next decade, and the Congressional Budget Office, the official fiscal advisers to Congress, predicted the law would cost $395 billion.
In late January, the White House said separate calculations, provided by Foster, indicated the law would cost $534 billion. The revelation provoked an outcry from Democrats and conservative Republicans concerned that the drug benefits would deepen the federal deficit.
Internal documents and federal officials made clear that the White House had known of the higher cost estimates for months. Until now, it has not been apparent the lengths to which Bush aides who negotiated the bill with Congress went to keep the figures private.
Foster, who was deputy chief actuary for the Social Security Administration for 13 years before becoming the chief Medicare actuary in 1995, said his office has a tradition of providing technical assistance to Congress "on an independent, nonpartisan basis."
But last June, he said, Scully directed him to "cease responding directly to Congress" and to funnel all cost estimates to Scully to decide which ones would be released. "More than once, Tom said he was just following orders," Foster said, adding he did not know where the orders came from but believed they might have originated in the White House.
Late that month, Foster dispatched an e-mail to several senior assistants and private actuaries in which he called the situation "nightmarish." He wrote: "I'm perhaps no longer in grave danger of being fired, but there remains a strong likelihood that I will have to resign in protest of the withholding of important technical information from key policy makers for political reasons." He said he decided to stay at his staff's urging.
Yesterday, HHS officials portrayed the matter as a conflict between Foster and Scully, who left the government for private consulting jobs a few months ago. "Those two just clearly did not get along," said Kevin Keane, assistant secretary for public affairs. "To suggest it's anyone else is way out of line."
Scully said in an interview he had only once forbidden Foster to release information. It would have been in response to a request from the staff of a liberal Democrat, Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark (Calif.), who wanted to know the effect on Medicare premiums of a form of private-sector competition with the program that had been deleted from the House bill at the time of the request. Scully said the request was designed to "blow up the Medicare bill over something that wasn't even in there anymore."
Foster said that was not the only request that Scully blocked. "I tried to persuade him this was not in the public interest, but I was not successful," Foster said.