With all the political tricks flying around Washington this week you’d think it was Halloween, but we still have more than a week to go.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) passed, to much fanfare, last week his health care reform bill. Much of the buzz around the bill is that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “scored” it as costing only $829 billion over 10 years. Democrats cheered.
(It goes to show you just how much ”change” the president has brought to Washington when you can preface $829 billion with the word “only” and no one laughs you out of town.)
But then it became clear that the only reason it came in under a trillion dollars is that the legislation didn’t include the “doc fix,” which costs some $240 billion or so. The doc fix is the result of 1997 legislation which said that if Medicare was not on a “sustainable growth rate,” doctors would have to take a reimbursement cut. Congress has managed to stave off that cut every year. But if it isn’t fixed by December, doctors will see about a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement payments.
The problem with the Baucus bill is that it only fixed the payment problem for one year, whereupon it reverts back to the status quo ante.
Democrats think they’ve already put so many new taxes and Medicare cuts in the bill as to threaten its passage, and so were wondering how they could slip through an extra quarter of a trillion dollars and still stay under President Obama’s recommended $900 billion total price tag for the bill while not adding to the deficit.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV), er, innovative solution: pull the doc fix out and pass it separately. So the doc fix would add to the deficit but the health care bill wouldn’t.
Well, several Democratic senators must not think their constituents are as stupid as Reid apparently does and on Wednesday voted no on cloture (to shut off debate). And so the measure died.
But the tricks aren’t over yet. With more than a week to go to Halloween, things may get even scarier.
Today’s TaxByte was written by IPI resident scholar, Dr. Merrill Matthews.