[Mr. Bird]

For years before Scully's arrival in 2001, key lawmakers had direct access to Medicare actuaries.

In 1997, when Republicans were having trouble obtaining health-care cost information from the Clinton administration, Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., now the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, added language to the Balanced Budget Act conference report to emphasize the importance of free access to Foster.

When I read crap like this, it's hard to get worked up over the underlying issue. Can anyone write an honest objective news item anymore?

[Steve_Seattle]

"When I read crap like this . . . "

As I was trying to point out in an earlier post, stories like this could be multiplied endlessly at all levels of government and in any large corporation. What is described in here is the ordinary push-and-shove of bureaucracies and hierarchies, where people at the top and in the mid-manage,ment levels want to control the flow of information to spin things a certain way. These things only become "news" when the press wants to make someone look bad, as they do with Bush. And as I said, the headline is false - the "White House" (Bush and his close advisors) was not involved in this. A fly on the wall would see things in major newsrooms, e.g., The Seattle Times, that would look as bad or worse than what's described here.

[GraniteStateConservative]

It's hard to get worked up over the fact that the Bush WH is being run the same way as the Clinton WH on this issue? I can get worked up pretty easily over the fact that HHS was using these actuaries for political purposes and was deliberately hiding information for those purposes. They all do it isn't an excuse I'd accept from my kids. We shouldn't accept it from this administration.