Sherrod Brown: “November 17 a year or so ago, just three weeks before the Medicare bill was signed into law, President Bush said this…”

“November 17 a year or so ago, just three weeks before the Medicare bill was signed into law, President Bush said this law would cost $400 billion. That is what he told the American public. That is what he told the Congress. Five months earlier, his actuaries in the center for Medicare/Medicaid services, the Medicare bureau, estimated the President's Medicare bill would cost $534 billion. I am not saying that the President lied about this, but it is pretty clear the President's people knew this bill cost $134 billion more than it really did. Whether the President knew about it, whether his top aides told him, remains a question. Now, the White House says, though, the bill will cost $576 billion. It is bad enough that the President and Republicans in Congress advertised one thing to this Congress and to the American people and sold them on another. What is worse is the deliberate nature of this deception and tactics used to achieve it. But let us go back and look at this whole Medicare bill and how we ended up where we did, starting from the time the drug industry and the insurance industry met in the Oval Office with President Bush and wrote the bill.”