The House Cloakroom: March 1 – 5, 2010
Analysis
The House will be in for a short week, only taking votes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The fallout from President Obama’s health care summit will continue to take center stage this week as negotiations continue to bring a health care vote to the House and Senate floors once again. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said to expect “further action on jobs” this week but it is unclear what exactly that means. Also expected on the floor next week is a bill out of the Education and Labor Committee, worrying some private schools as well as those who disagree with a Washington-centric one-size-fits-all policy.
Major Floor Action
- Expect legislation to extend some expiring provisions on things like unemployment insurance, highways, the “Doc Fix”, satellite TV and perhaps others.
- Still-to-be-defined jobs measures
- HR 4247 The Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in School Acts
Major Committee Action
- The House Appropriations Subcommittees will continue to hold hearings on proposed fiscal 2011 appropriations.
- The House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on Navy Shipbuilding.
- Several Committees will continue to hold hearings on the 2011 budget requests.
The Senate Cloakroom: March 1 – 5, 2010
Analysis
While the Senate focuses on the shiny object of government job creation and tax extenders, the real action will take place behind closed doors as Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and his deputies explore their options on Obamacare. Following last week’s health care summit and the President’s assertion that there are indeed “ philosophical disagreements,” the stage seems set for reconciliation. If the Senator Reid does go nuclear, the entire Congressional agenda, including talks on financial regulatory reform, could well be thrown into chaos.
Major Floor Action
- On Monday, the Senate will take up H.R.4213, which will serve as the vehicle an extension of jobless benefits, COBRA insurance and numerous health payments offered by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT). Numerous tax provisions will also be extended in the bill.
Major Committee Action
- The Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on chemical security.
- The Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the 2010 trade agenda.
- The Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on the 2011 Air Force budget.
- The Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing on the Clean Air Act.
In his primetime health care address before a Joint Session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised the American people: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.” But it is hard work adding $1 trillion in government spending while claiming with a straight face that you are not adding to the deficit. Enter White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel who has just the solution: just strip out $247 billion of the spending in the bill, pass it separately, and voila … your job just got one-fourth easier.
The specific issue at hand is the centrally planned price control regime the federal government uses to reimburse doctor’s who participate in Medicare. Medicare reimburses doctors and other medical professionals for their services according to a congressionally created fee schedule that is annually adjusted by the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. The idea is relatively simple: If Medicare spending grows faster than our overall economy (which is almost always the case), then payments to Medicare providers are supposed to be reduced proportionately to keep expenditures in line over a period of time.
Problem is every year Congress–under both Democratic and Republican leadership–routinely blocks the cuts from going into effect. Subsequently, the necessary cumulative cut in Medicare payments grows bigger. Without a change to current law, payments to physicians would be reduced by 21.5% as of January 1, 2010. The Senate Finance Committee bill addresses this problem by raising the reimbursement rate for one year and then pretending that Congress will allow massive cuts for the next 9 years. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) rightfully called the Senate Finance Committee proposal a façade.
The Obama administration’s proposed solution, however, is no more honest. Instead of pretending Congress will cut doctor’s Medicare reimbursement rates, the Senate wants to pretend the doc fix isn’t part of health care reform. So Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) dissembled Friday: “Correcting the Medicare doctors’ payment discrepancy is a budgetary problem — health insurance reform tackles a serious regulatory problem. That’s why we need to fix the Medicare doctors’ payments first, outside of health reform.” The Washington Post editorial board responded this morning:
Mr. Reid’s attempt to distinguish the budgetary and regulatory issues is nonsensical. The health reform measure includes all sorts of changes in the ways that various providers are compensated. True, the problem with inadequate Medicare payments is something of a preexisting condition to health reform, but that does not make it unrelated. The so-called doc fix is being rushed to the Senate floor this week in advance of health reform not because it has nothing to do with health reform but because it has everything to do with it.
…
A president who says that he is serious about dealing with the dire fiscal picture cannot credibly begin by charging this one to the national credit card, with no concern for the later generations who will have to pay the bill.
And it is the later generations that should be particularly concerned with this shell game. That $247 billion price tag is just the ten year cost of the doc fix. Looking over the long-term, the 75-year cost to our national debt is another $3 trillion. This past Friday the Obama administration admitted that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945. Just like Obamacare’s massive expansion of the Medicaid rolls, the doc fix shell game exposes the fact that Obamacare is just a continuation of the current budget busting health care system, not real reform.
Quick Hits:
- According to data from the Congressional Budget Office and Kaiser Family Foundation, Obamacare would expand Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to the point that nearly one in five Americans would be on government programs that provide health care to the poor. This would be the biggest single expansion since Medicaid was created in 1965.
- California is poised to become the first state to ban big-screen TVs due to their power-heavy demands.
- According to an internal Energy Department audit, the Energy Star program (which the Obama administration threw $300 million of ’stimulus’ at) doesn’t properly track whether manufacturers that give their appliances an Energy Star label have met the required specifications for energy efficiency.
- The high-mileage car tax credit in President Obama’s failed stimulus allows for a federal tax credit generous enough to pay for half or even two-thirds of the average sticker price of a golf cart.
- U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps.