In today’s New York Times, Richard Stevenson, covering President Bush’s trip to Missouri to tout his Medicare drug benefit, writes that after the president signed the legislation last year:
Mr. Bush came under intense criticism from some conservative Republicans who said both that the bill cost too much and that the White House might have deliberately withheld cost estimates showing the price tag to be higher than the official Congressional estimate.
But it wasn’t just “some conservative Republicans” who said that the White House might have withheld cost estimates to hide the bill’s true cost. Here’s Robert Pear writing in the Times in May:
The Congressional Research Service says the Bush administration apparently violated federal law by ordering the chief Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress indicating that the new Medicare law could cost far more than White House officials had said.
Before the new law was passed, numerous members of congress expressed skepticism about the price tag the administration was attaching to it for public consumption. Little did they know that Medicare’s own chief actuary had sounded the same alarm — only to be ordered into silence by his superiors. These days, even the administration itself has all but given up denying that the deception took place. A spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services told Pear for the same article, “We are looking to the future, not the past.”
We recommend Pear’s work to Stevenson. He can find it in his own newspaper.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.