Perhaps the world has moved on too quickly in the three days since Rick Foster, the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released an audit of the Senate health care bill filled with actuarial projections and speculative financial voodoo. For whatever reason, the media has published only half the story about Foster's report. Even TPM has failed to flush out the story, despite my submission of the facts in two emails and brief conversations with Eric Kleefeld and Josh Marshall himself.

While TPM and other media published  multiple stories Friday about Foster's report, they didn't say much beyond the obvious: That Foster's audit concludes the Senate health care bill would inflate America's health care costs by additional billions and threaten the profitability of one in five hospitals and nursing homes.

Of course the Republicans seized on the audit immediately as proof that Medicare would suffer and that our entire health care system would collapse, leaving us all to wander forty years in the wilderness in search of an urgent care clinic and a Q-tip. John McCain, the Senate point man on defeating health care reform, called the report "a dagger in the heart" of the Senate bill.

Not that Foster's report was all bad. In some ways, it actually supports the Senate bill's fiscal responsibility and health care objectives.

But in the end, Foster's report is meaningless because its author is a liar who has proven himself susceptible to partisan GOP pressure and fully capable of fudging numbers to affect the outcome of pending legislation. In fact, Foster did exactly this when Congress last considered a major change to our health care system: the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, otherwise known as Medicare Part D.

Had it not been for Foster's willingness to cook the numbers and deliberately underestimate the cost of the Medicare drug bill, it very likely would not have passed at all, given it's slim margin of a single vote in the House and the outrage of lawmakers upon discovering they had been duped.

Although Foster had already concluded the new drug benefit would cost $500-$600 billion over 10 years, Congress was told the cost would not exceed $400 billion. Foster provided the fudged numbers under pressure from the Bush administration and his boss, CMMS Andministrator Thomas Scully. According to an internal report, Scully had threatened to fire Foster if he released the real numbers. Scully denied this but acknowledged instructing Foster to withhold the real cost projections.

Given Foster's past ability to knowingly produce reports for Congress that miss the mark by hundreds of billions of dollars, I am amazed he still has his job. The fact that Republicans are crowing about his latest numbers is a testament to the conveniently short memories of politicians, as well as the frightfully circumscribed attention spans of our media.