Yahoo! News - Report: Withholding Medicare Costs Legal
WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials broke no laws in withholding from Congress estimates of the cost of the new Medicare law, says an internal investigation made public Tuesday.

The Health and Human Services Department inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, said its three-month investigation found that administration officials used aggressive tactics to keep from Congress its much higher estimates of the legislation's cost — $100 billion more than the president and other officials were acknowledging.

Yet the effort — including threats by Thomas Scully, the administration's Medicare chief until December, to fire chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster — did not violate federal law, the inspector general said.

That conclusion contradicted the findings of the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which in May said that threats against Foster designed to keep him from giving Democratic lawmakers his projections of the bill's cost probably broke the law. The Justice Department, in an opinion attached to Tuesday's report, said CRS was wrong.

"It sounds as though the Bush administration examined itself and found it did nothing wrong," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means health subcommittee.

If it's not against the law, it sure as hell should be.