Democrats Demand Inquiry Into Charge by Medicare Officer:
"Democrats called Saturday for an investigation of charges that the Bush administration threatened to fire a top Medicare official if he gave data to Congress showing the high costs of hotly contested Medicare legislation.

The official, Richard S. Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare program, said he had been formally told not to provide the information to Congress. Moreover, he said, he was told that 'the consequences of insubordination would be very severe.'"

Senior officials at the Medicare agency made it clear that "they would try and fire me" for responding directly to inquiries from Congress, Mr. Foster said in an interview on Saturday.

Mr. Foster said he had received that message from Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program. Mr. Scully denies threatening Mr. Foster but confirms having told him to withhold certain information from Congress.…

The Senate and the House approved different Medicare bills on June 27, after being assured that the cost would not exceed $400 billion over 10 years, the amount proposed by President Bush.

Just two weeks earlier, Mr. Foster estimated that the drug benefits in a bill very similar to the Senate measure would cost $551.5 billion.

Mr. Foster said he prepared "dozens and dozens of analyses and estimates" of the cost of the legislation last year. "All our estimates showed that the cost of the drug benefit, through 2013, would be in the range of $500 billion to $600 billion," he said.

The cost estimates were all provided to Mr. Scully, and some were also sent to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Foster said. For example, he said, "some cost estimates were sent directly to Doug Badger," the White House official who coordinates health policy for the administration.

Mr. Duffy confirmed that the White House had received the actuary's cost estimates for parts of the bill. But he said the administration had relied on the Congressional Budget Office as "the primary authority" on the overall cost.

"For many years," Mr. Foster said, "my office has provided technical assistance to the administration and Congress on a nonpartisan basis.

"But in June 2003, the Medicare administrator, Tom Scully, decided to restrict the practice of our responding directly to Congressional requests and ordered us to provide responses to him so he could decide what to do with them. There was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes, which I thought was inappropriate."

Mr. Foster, 55, was an actuary at the Social Security Administration from 1973 to 1995, when he became chief Medicare actuary.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/politics/14MEDI.html?pagewanted=all&position=