MEDICARE DRUG COSTS White House forbids adviser's testimony

When lawmakers passed the bill, many relied on a lower cost estimate.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- Citing executive privilege, the White House refused to allow President Bush's chief health-policy adviser, Douglas Badger, to testify today before the House Ways and Means Committee about early administration estimates that the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit would be far more costly than many lawmakers believed when they voted for it.
White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the decision not to let Badger testify was justified by the long-standing principle that exempts assistants to the president from testifying before Congress.
Executive privilege, while not mentioned specifically in the Constitution, has been recognized by the Supreme Court as necessary to, as Duffy put it, "preserve the White House's ability to get the best information possible and to speak candidly."
Same argument for Rice
Until Bush yielded Tuesday, his administration used the same argument to keep National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from testifying publicly before the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Several Ways and Means Committee members wanted to know whether Badger suppressed or passed on to senior Bush administration officials figures he obtained in early June indicating that the drug benefit might cost more than $500 billion in its first 10 years. When lawmakers narrowly passed the measure in November, many relied on a $395 billion Congressional Budget Office estimate.
Firing threat
Knight Ridder reported March 11 that former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully threatened to fire his chief actuary, Richard Foster, if Foster shared the far higher estimate with members of Congress.
The alleged firing threat, which Scully contends was not serious, sparked sharp bipartisan criticism from lawmakers, editorial writers and interest groups, as did the administration's effort to keep the higher cost figure out of the congressional debate. Lawmakers in prior years had free access to Foster's estimates.
In testimony last week before the Ways and Means Committee, Foster said that Badger, Scully and other members of the Bush administration received his June estimate that the program might cost $511 billion.
But Foster said he didn't know whether those estimates were shared with higher-ups in the White House -- perhaps even with Bush, who lobbied hard for the bill.