HOW HE SEES IT It's time to kill the Medicare drug law

By DEROY MURDOCK
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
NEW YORK -- The brand-new Medicare drug benefit was supposed to drag this 1960s' scheme into the 21st century and boost GOP political fortunes.
Instead, it has ignited a growing scandal and hobbled Medicare's already wobbly finances. Republicans should repeal this boondoggle and enact a smaller, cheaper measure for low-income seniors who lack pharmaceutical insurance.
Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster, recently explained that he knew this proposal would exceed the $395 billion price tag the Bush administration waved about.
"The earlier estimates," Foster told the House Ways and Means Committee March 24, "were in the range of $550 billion through fiscal year 2013." Last June 11, Foster predicted the Senate's drug bill, similar to the final package, would cost $551.5 billion.
Even worse, Foster's supervisors prohibited him from alerting congressmen and their staffers to this huge discrepancy. When they requested his figures, Foster testified that his then-boss, former Medicare administrator Thomas Scully, threatened to dismiss him if he sent numbers to Capitol Hill, as Foster routinely has done throughout his 31-year career.
"I had a difficult choice," Foster said. "I could ignore the orders. I knew I would get fired."
Scully -- a former Bush political appointee -- disputes this and claims he was kidding when he said he would sack Foster.
Funny, Scully's administrative assistant considered this no laughing matter. In an e-mail that the Wall Street Journal published March 18, Jeffrey Flick told Foster, "Work up the numbers and share them with Tom Scully only. NO ONE ELSE." He continued in bold face: "The consequences for insubordination are extremely severe."
The joke escaped Foster, too. He took his supervisors' admonitions seriously enough to discuss them with a Medicare attorney and considered resigning in protest. This intimidation of Foster may have been criminal.
Criminal statutes
"We believe that at least two federal criminal statutes were possibly violated by officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the White House: 1. Obstruction of Proceedings Before Departments, Agencies and Committees ... and 2. Fraud and False Statements," Senators Clinton of New York, Lautenberg of New Jersey, Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Stabenow of Michigan wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft on March 24.
For once, these left-wing Democrats are right.
The Washington-based Government Accountability Project said it "has determined that threatening Mr. Foster violated seven laws," including the Congressional Right to Know Act and the Whistleblower Protection Act.
With Foster effectively bound and gagged for more than five months, and his prognoses unknown to Democrats and rank-and-file Republicans, the House of Representatives passed the drug plan by just five votes Nov. 22. Fiscal conservatives, already wary of this legislation, would have killed it had they known it really cost 35 percent more than advertised. The White House finally confessed Jan. 29 that the benefit will consume at least $534 billion, a total eerily close to Foster's suppressed June 11 appraisal.
This enormous new entitlement already has cracked an axle on the creaky Medicare wagon. The system's trustees reported March 23 that Medicare's main fund will go bankrupt in 2019 rather than 2026. The drug plan doesn't help.
This fiscal malpractice has not even bought the White House political dividends. An Aug. 25-26, 2003 Gallup poll found 40 percent of adults approved of the president's handling of Medicare while 48 percent disapproved. After the benefit's adoption, a March 26-28 Gallup survey saw 35 percent approve of Bush on Medicare, while disapproval climbed to 55 percent.
Concealed costs
The GOP Congress should dump the drug benefit. It should spare taxpayers this absurdly expensive new project whose true costs were concealed by an administration that sacrificed integrity and fiscal responsibility on an altar of blind ambition.
Instead, Republicans should develop a modest plan exclusively for poor seniors who lack coverage, rather than any American over 65, including multimillionaires and those who already have drug insurance.
The Medicare drug benefit has metastasized from bad policy to bad politics and now to scandal and possible criminality. This law begs to be euthanized. The GOP should pulls its plug. As for the perpetrators of this colossal public fraud, the Justice Department should fit them for orange jumpsuits.
XDeroy Murdock is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va.