Gwen Graham: “there is a recurring pattern in this town. An issue comes to our attention. It is red hot. It creates a great deal of…”

“there is a recurring pattern in this town. An issue comes to our attention. It is red hot. It creates a great deal of controversy. Two months later it is forgotten. My effort tonight is going to be to resurrect one of those issues because I think is it not only extremely important, but it is also urgent that we give it attention. The issue is the administration's cost estimate of the Medicare Modernization and Improvement Act and the circumstances surrounding the failure to release that cost estimate to the Congress. As I said, this is old news, but let me just refresh some people's memories. As early as the summer of 2003, the administration's actuaries, the people who work for the administration in the Department of Health and Human Services, projected that the 10-year cost of the Medicare legislation, which among other things provided a prescription drug benefit, would be $534 billion over a 10-year period. It is also old news that Mr. Rick Foster, Chief Actuary of the Medicare Program, was ordered by the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--at that time Mr. Thomas Scully--to withhold critical actuarial data from Congress and that failure to abide by this order might well result in Mr. Foster being fired. What is yet to be news are the reasons for the months' long delay in disclosing that estimate to the American public and to the Congress.”