"Official Says He Was Told To Withhold Medicare Data" Whenever Bush claims he has a plan to "fix medicare", you can disregard him completely. True conservatives have always, always, hated medicare and any other entitlement program, and believe that such programs are antithetical to their ideal that the "government that governs best is the government that governs least". While some would say that his medicare plan betrays this principle, I actually think he's quite craftily pushing through legislation he knows Republican legislators could never accept, thereby giving himself grounds for referring to himself as a "moderate"...Then again, he could just be corrupt and dumb as a stump. "...The government's longtime chief analyst of Medicare costs said yesterday that Bush administration officials threatened to fire him last year if he disclosed to Congress that he believed the prescription drug legislation favored by the White House would prove far more expensive than lawmakers had been told...In late January, the White House said calculations provided by Foster, indicated the law would cost $534 billion. That provoked an outcry from Democrats and conservative Republicans concerned that the drug benefits would deepen the federal deficit...Internal documents and federal officials made clear that the White House had known of the higher cost estimates for months". Read The Full Article