The truth about medicare cuts

The Baucus Bill accounting involves big cuts in Medicare spending.  So what is Congress doing right now?  See Mickey Kaus for the grim details:

Mickey's Assignment Desk: Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts.

Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years--that, as Megan McArdle among others argues, the projected Medicare cuts in Baucus' bill simply won't happen. ...

P.S.: I'm still for health care reform, of course, even if the accounting that scores it as deficit neutral proves to be a fantasy. We make the mess now. We make it work and pay for it later. Stuff the beast!  If it turns out that to get the reform passed Dems have to resort to a shell game--with phony peas to boot--well, just keep it between us, OK?. ...