Medicare Memo?
I read in Salon’s newsfeed that the Administration is refusing to release a memo exploring how senior citizen decisions on medicare will affect their out-of-pocket costs. In theory, the memo says refusing to convert to HMO Medicare will increase their health care costs by as much as 25%.
According to the AP story on “Salon”:http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/06/25/memo/index.html (browsing gymnastics required), congressional Democrats requested the analysis from Medicare chief actuary Rick Foster. Foster’s boss (Medicare chief Tom Scully) apparently threatened to fire Foster if Foster complied, although Scully says it was an idle threat. Scully said he would release the report “if I feel like it” and insisted the Democrats had no right to the document.
bq. They don’t have the right on the Hill to call up my actuary and demand things. These people work for the executive branch, period.
Ooops. Or not…
bq. Democrats responded by pointing to legislative language approved in 1997 that specifically requires the top Medicare actuary to answer questions from Congress. “While the chief actuary is an official within the administration, this individual and his or her office often must work with the committees of jurisdiction in the development of legislation,” said the legislative report.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that was written by Republicans in congress trying to get access to Clinton materials. Now it’s being used against a sitting Republican. Sure you wanna change dem fillibuster rules, buster?
It’ll be interesting to see who gets the parlimentary upper hand here. But obviously this administration has decided that Democrats cannot possibly come up with anything more scary than what is in this report — otherwise they’d release it, right? I mean, if it’s good news what do they have to hide? I suppose you could argue it’s the principle of the thing, but do you really want to play principle games with senior medicare voters?
