White House Releases Fake News

[Perfection]

The White House made 13 stories promoting the new medicare and sent them to a varidy of TV Stations all over the US. A lot of the info in the commericals isn't true.

[Trauma-san]

Like what.

[smerlus]

HOLY SHIT! DAN RATHERS POSTS HERE?!??!




thanks for the vague news flash dick wad

[Perfection]

Mysterious Fax Adds to Intrigue Over the Medicare Bill's Cost
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ROBERT PEAR

Published: March 18, 2004


ASHINGTON, March 17 — 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.

The administration says Democrats, whose Medicare proposals would have cost nearly $1 trillion, are exploiting the controversy for political gain at the expense of the elderly. But some Republicans are openly questioning the White House, and the Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said he saw a "growing scandal over the Medicare drug bill."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and a leading critic of the Medicare bill, put the issue in stark, Watergate-era terms, saying, "What did the president know; when did he know it?"

Those questions have not been answered. But interviews with federal officials, including Mr. Foster and Mr. Scully, make clear that the actuary's numbers were circulating within the administration, and possibly on Capitol Hill, throughout the second half of last year, as Congress voted on the prescription drug bill, first in June and again in November.

But the figures were either discounted or ignored, as lawmakers and the White House grappled with the political imperative to pass the legislation.

At a hearing on Feb. 10, Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, told lawmakers that "we knew all along" that the administration's cost estimates would be higher, but said he did not have a final figure, of $534 billion, until Dec. 24, after the bill was signed into law. Nonetheless, Mr. Thompson said he and Mr. Scully had shared their estimates with House and Senate negotiators and with the White House throughout the legislative process.

"There were individuals in the White House who knew that our preliminary estimates were higher," Mr. Thompson testified.

Yet as late as November, Mr. Scully continued to cite the $400 billion figure, which came from the Congressional Budget Office. In a letter to The New York Times published on Nov. 20, Mr. Scully wrote, "We are spending $400 billion."

One House negotiator, Representative Nancy L. Johnson, Republican of Connecticut, said she knew of the higher estimates last year, but discounted them because she thought Mr. Foster's assumptions were flawed. "Absolutely, we knew about these numbers," she said.

But Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, who was also a negotiator, said on Wednesday that he did not learn of the higher estimates until January, when he attended a Republican leaders' retreat. An aide to Mr. DeLay said Joshua B. Bolten, President Bush's budget director, presented the $534 billion final figure at that meeting.

"The leaders about took his head off," said the aide, Stuart Roy, adding, "It was very clear that none of the leaders in that room had ever heard those numbers before."

Mr. DeLay told reporters on Wednesday that the actuary's numbers are "irrelevant to the policy that we passed." In any event, he said, Congress is required to use the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office.

But Mr. Foster's figures do have significance. The Medicare bill was President Bush's highest legislative priority going into the election year, and Congressional forecasts about its cost were highly uncertain. At the same time, conservative lawmakers were up in arms over the expense, and were threatening to vote against the measure.

Ultimately, the legislation squeaked through the House by a final vote of 220 to 215, but only after Republican leaders kept the roll call open for nearly three hours while they twisted the arms of recalcitrant party members. Had the cost estimates been higher than the Congressional Budget Office figures, lawmakers of both parties say, it is possible the Republican-backed bill would have been doomed, or at least significantly altered.

Democrats, sensing a political opportunity in an election year, are now calling for hearings. On Wednesday, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, threatened to sue Mr. Thompson to get access to Mr. Foster's estimates. Some Republicans are also demanding answers.

"If anyone was truly pressured by a superior to withhold information from Congress, that is profoundly unethical and inappropriate," said Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican who voted reluctantly for the bill.

Seeking to quell the furor, Mr. Thompson announced Tuesday that he had ordered an independent inquiry by the office of the inspector general in his department.

"We have nothing to hide," the secretary said.

This is not the first time Medicare's chief actuary has been caught in a political tempest. In 1997, Republicans, frustrated in their efforts to get information from the actuary under the Clinton administration, wrote into law provisions protecting his independence and stating that he "may be removed only for cause."

Ms. Bjorklund said Democrats routinely made direct requests of Mr. Foster, who has held the actuary's job since 1995. But in an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Scully said that from the time he took office in 2001, he disagreed with Mr. Foster over how much independence the actuary should have.

"Rick felt he was an independent operator," said Mr. Scully, who resigned in December to join a law firm. "My view was that the actuary is part of the executive branch. We had to have some ability to know what he was doing."

Mr. Foster said that he was told in June 2003 that he should not respond directly to certain Congressional requests, and that `the consequences of insubordination would be very severe." Moreover, he said, "there was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes."

The tensions peaked that month, when, Ms. Bjorklund said, she learned Republicans were drafting a provision that would set up competition between private health plans and the traditional government-run Medicare program. On June 17, she sent Mr. Foster an e-mail message asking him to estimate the proposal's cost. On June 24, still lacking the information, she telephoned him.

"He said, `I cannot give it to you. I'm afraid I could be fired,' " Ms. Bjorklund said. After reminding him that he could be fired only for cause, she said, she called Mr. Scully, who, she said, declared that he could fire Mr. Foster for "insubordination — directly defying my orders."

Mr. Scully remembers a heated conversation, but says he never threatened to fire Mr. Foster. But the exchange was so upsetting to Ms. Bjorklund, she said, that she told her boss, Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the health subcommittee of the Ways and Means panel.

The next day, June 25, Mr. Stark put out a news release about it, without mentioning Mr. Foster by name. But with the House preparing to vote on the Medicare bill, Mr. Stark said, his accusations were lost in the bigger battle. On June 26, just hours before the vote, Ms. Bjorklund said, she received a part of the information she had requested from Mr. Foster, but still no cost estimates.

Over the months that followed, Ms. Bjorklund said, she continued to ask for the actuary's estimates, without success. Not until Jan. 30, when the anonymous fax was sent, did she get a peek at those numbers.

[Trauma-san]

Do you have a source for that?  I could flood the board from "HARDCORERIGHTWINGCONSERVATIVE.COM" but I doubt anybody would trust it.

[Perfection]

www.nytimes.com is where the article & story came from.

[pappy]

the dubbya supporters will refuse to believe bush lies at all.  like when i made a topic about bush lying about air quaility in downtown manhattan days after 9-11 with a source.  that source was the ny daily news.  the supporters still asked for more sources