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?. ...

Comments

[Macgregor]

I for one believe this Baucus Bill is the worst thing ever! Our healthcare system is broke already and overinflated with high costs in insurance premiums..."The Baucus Bill" will make our already overburned healthcare system worse for the working man! So, in essence: middle-aged working people will be mandated (forced) by the government to purchase unreliable insurance from the very companies who can not be trusted now! The middle-aged working class (facing a threat of government fines) will recieve no subsidies and have to pay the majority of the costs! Faced with inflation, deflating wages, and mandatory unreliable health insurance...why would anyone want to work? This will encourage many to stop looking for jobs, so, they can qualify for insurance subsistance without having to be forced to pay for healthcare insurance if they were working with no subsidies. This bill is the biggest piece of crap I've ever read in my life! (Originally, I'm from Montana and I can tell you that I always, always voted for the man running against Baucus. It's a crying shame the rest in Montana could not have joined me earlier).

[Macgregor]

The Baucus Bill is not going to set well with the majority in the House of Representatives and it should not. I support the Public Option and no bill can be called genuine "Healthcare Reform" without the Public Option. The Speaker of the House has been quite adament about this and I believe she and the House better stick by the Public Option and NOT compromise it at any costs.

[KB]

Mac: What's come over you? Criticizing something Barack Obama supports? I have to take back all that stuff I said about Obama worship.

I don't think the Baucus bill is the worse ever. It's kinda honest, in a relative to Congress sort of way. But what it does show is that the Democrats don't have the courage of their age old convictions on healthcare reform. If they could somehow be tough with the trial lawyers, the health workers unions, etc., then they might actually get a major transformation of the American healthcare system, and one that would be looked upon by the voters as a success.