I’m not sure if it’s worse than Social Security, but it sure would put Bernie Madoff to shame. It’s so bad, The Wall Street Journal says it would make Madoff blush.
The “doc fix” was originally part of ObamaCare, until Mrs. Pelosi realized that adding a quarter-trillion dollars to the total tab made it difficult to pretend the bill would reduce the deficit. In the “Fiscal Responsibility” section of the press release announcing the separate SGR package, Democrats insist that it will be subject to “the ‘pay as you go’ principle of budget discipline,” which “requires Congress to find a way to pay for any new spending” with new taxes or cuts.
The Comedy Central punchline: “A previous Congress established the policy for paying Medicare doctors, so the update for 2010 is not a new policy to be paid for. . . . The Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act would not increase total payments to physicians above what they are today and therefore, would not be subject to the paygo requirement.” In other words, under the Madoff school of accounting, Democrats rely on straight deficit spending.
Yet even that obscures the true costs. Mrs. Pelosi stripped $35 billion from the original score by changing the way Medicare pays for drugs administered in physician offices and raiding a Medicare reserve fund. President Obama’s continued promises that he won’t sign a health bill that increases the deficit is by now indefensible.
Everyone agrees that the SGR must be corrected, given that steeper cuts in Medicare’s submarket price controls mean that many physicians will refuse to treat seniors—but not without cleaning up the mess created by the prior cost-control inspirations of the political class. A new Heritage Foundation study by the former Medicare trustee Thomas Saving and economist Andrew Rettenmaier finds that eliminating the SGR without offsets will increase Medicare’s unfunded liabilities by $1.9 trillion over the next 75 years. Given that the entitlement is already about $39 trillion in the hole (give or take a few trillion), the SGR fix alone is a European-style value-added tax waiting to happen, not including the huge new permanent spending commitments created by ObamaCare.
Senate Democrats already scotched the two-bill approach earlier this month, which is itself a good indication of how reckless Mrs. Pelosi’s gambit is. Even Madoff might blush.
But hey, what’s a few trillion between friends?
This is what happens when individuals have no idea of the cost of their own health care. All congress is doing is making it worse.
