Internal report finds no laws broken over

 Medicare estimates kept from Congress
By Mark Sherman; Wednesday, July 07, 2004.

  The Associated Press WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials broke no laws in withholding from Congress estimates of the cost of the new Medicare law, says an internal investigation made public yesterday.
  The Health and Human Services Department inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, said its three-month investigation found that administration officials used aggressive tactics to keep from Congress its much higher estimates of the legislation's cost - $100 billion more than the president and other officials were acknowledging.
  Yet the effort - including threats by Thomas Scully, the administration's Medicare chief until December, to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster - did not violate federal law, the inspector general said.
  Scully, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had "the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress," the unsigned report said.
  That conclusion contradicted the findings of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which said in May that threats against Foster designed to keep him from giving Democratic legislators his projections of the bill's cost probably broke the law.
  The General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, also is looking into whether the gag order violated federal law.
  Bill Pierce, an HHS spokesman, said yesterday's report showed the administration acted properly. "We hope that with the release of this report we can put behind us the political squabbling and move on to the important work of implementing the new law," he said.
  Democrats, however, said the inspector general's inquiry underscored the need for an independent investigation that looks at what role the White House played in suppressing information.
  "It sounds as though the Bush administration examined itself and found it did nothing wrong," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means health subcommittee.
  The investigations highlight the trouble the Bush administration has had in promoting the new Medicare prescription-drug law, thought to be an election-year boon for the GOP. In addition, the law's first widely available tangible benefit, the Medicare-approved discount-drug-card program, has gotten off to a slow, confusing start.
  The Associated Press reported a year ago that Scully threatened to fire Foster if Foster released his calculations to Democrats. Scully said his comments were "heated rhetoric in middle of the night."
  The matter took on a new life when the administration projected in the budget it submitted to Congress that the 10-year cost of the bill would be $534 billion, instead of the $395 billion estimate used in writing the legislation.
  Foster's estimates, written during consideration of the bill, have yet to be made public or turned over to congressional Democrats who have requested them. In March, Thompson promised to release them and said the inspector general's investigation would clear the air.
  But he since has refused to release the documents in question.