Politics: Onward from New Hampshire

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Why anyone believes them now is beyond me. But maybe congressional Republicans won't want to be burned again.

• The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.
  
  When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.
  
  Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

linky

eta:

"Note that the administration's previous declarations that they learned of the higher estimates only after the bill was passed are now 'inoperative.'" -- Brad DeLong.