Now He Tells Us

After announcing his resignation as secretary of Health and Human Services on Friday, Tommy Thompson finally revealed his concerns about the government’s shortcomings in providing health and human services. “I worry about [the new prescription drug benefit] every single night,” he said, because it bars the federal government from negotiating with drug companies for low prices.

Oh, and a recent avian flu outbreak “is a really huge bomb” that could soon kill 30 million to 70 million people, he added. And, of course, there was his well-publicized remark about a food supply unprotected from terrorism.

As the Republican governor of Wisconsin from 1987 to 2001, Thompson was widely admired for his bluntness. He could be just as candid in criticizing welfare beneficiaries for failing to seek employment, for instance, as in lambasting state governments for starving job training programs that could help those recipients find work.

That changed when he became HHS secretary. Thompson, like most top officials in the Bush administration, publicly hewed to the party line. Although privately he might have acknowledged that old scourges like the flu were as dangerous as bioterrorism, he never said a dissenting word in public when Congress increased his bioterrorism funding 15-fold while flat-lining that for infectious diseases. Thompson was also a cheerleader for the Medicare prescription drug benefit that he now seems to regard as deeply flawed.

Conventional wisdom in Washington has it that Mark McClellan, the head of the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, is a shoo-in for Thompson’s job. In hearings earlier this year, senators let McClellan get away with rhetorical murder -- failing to question his absurd assertion that the Medicare prescription drug legislation gives beneficiaries “the best possible negotiated price discounts on the drugs they purchase ... better than could be achieved through direct government negotiation.”

There’s not much to be gained from bemoaning Thompson’s failure to speak out publicly about policy flaws when he was in a position to correct them. Senators could do the nation some good, though, if they put aside their rubber stamps long enough to ask tougher questions of whomever the president nominates to succeed him.