Congress wants America to believe its new promises to control spending even as it reneges on its old promises and spends more than ever.
The “new” promise within health care reform bills is to reduce Medicare spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet simultaneously, Congress is reversing 1997 legislation that claimed it would reduce Medicare spending.
The latest example of hypocrisy is known in Washington as the “doc fix,” (shorthand for fixing payment rates to doctors) and it’s scheduled for a House of Representatives vote next week.
Doctors have a valid complaint that government underpayments make it unprofitable to see Medicare patients. But throwing more borrowed money at the problem makes things worse because it moves Medicare and the rest of the federal budget deeper into bankruptcy.
The cost estimate for the doc fix varies from $210- to $245-billion. But it’s actually far larger. A study by Texas A&M scholars and a former Medicare trustee (published by the Heritage Foundation) shows the doc fix legislation “increases Medicare’s unfunded obligation by $1.9 trillion using the 75-year horizon and by $4.1 trillion in the long term.”
This is on top of news that October’s federal deficit was $176-billion. That’s for a single month. Next year’s deficit is projected to surpass the $1.4-trillion record set this year.
Washington’s attitude is summed up well by one of today’s headlines, “After spending binge, White House says it will focus on deficits.”
“After.” Discipline is always put off until tomorrow.
The “doc fix” is accompanied by promises of “PAYGO” (pay-as-you-go) rules to require new spending to be offset—and full of the same loopholes Congress historically has exploited.
The doc fix itself was created by 1997 legislation that promised to curtail spending by future reductions in Medicare payment rates to doctors. Once the deadline arrived, Congress and the President pushed it back. It’s already been pushed back for seven years in a row. The House next week will vote on an extra ten-year pushback.
But there’s no new revenue source and no spending offsets for the extra costs of this. And Congress and President Obama have exempted this $250-billion from his promise not to add one dime to the deficit in healthcare legislation.
It’s a “King’s X” to their pledge. Time out. Fingers crossed.
Hope exists that fiscally-responsible House members will reject the doc fix next week in a bipartisan way. One bright ray came when the Senate last month rejected the doc fix on a 47-53 procedural vote. This time around, the Senate has set a good example for the rest of Washington to follow.
Throughout the health care debate, President Barack Obama repeatedly promised the American people that his health care plan “will help bring our deficits under control in the long term.” The problem is that the White House could not get the Congressional Budget Office to cooperate. Throughout the summer the CBO issued report after report showing that the versions of Obamacare working their way through Congress all added to the deficit.
First, CBO found that the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) bill would increase the deficit by $1 trillion. Three weeks later, the CBO released a report on a revised bill showing HELP 2.0 only raised the deficit by $597 billion. The House then got a little clever and tried to game the CBO scoring system by phasing in the major spending of their bill over time, but even that maneuver left them with $245 billion added to the deficit in the first ten years (with crippling deficits to come as the entitlement spending ramped up in the out years).
Enter Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) who was determined to manipulate the CBO’s scoring system as best he could and deliver a deficit neutral version of Obamacare. After months of working directly with CBO staff, Baucus scored a victory for Obamacare yesterday when the CBO released a preliminary analysis purporting to show that the Baucus bill would reduce deficits by a total of $81 billion over the next decade. The New York Times awarded Baucus with the headline that the White House has been searching for since the debate first began: “Health Care Bill Gets Green Light in Cost Analysis.” But this headline and the accompanying article are fundamentally dishonest. As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”
Indeed, the CBO went to great pains to emphasize this fact in their letter to Congress: “CBO and JCT’s analysis is preliminary in large part because the Chairman’s mark, as amended, has not yet been embodied in legislative language.” But this isn’t even the most deceptive part of what the left in Congress is trying to pull on the American people. Not only does the Baucus bill not even really exist, just a Vapor Bill filled with conceptual language, it is about to be completely thrown out the window when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) merges it with the deficit busting HELP bill to move it to the Senate floor.
Then the real deception begins. Majority Leader Reid will then move to proceed on a House passed TARP tax bill, completely gut it, and insert his version of Obamacare. After the Senate passes the bill it will go to the House where if it is approved without amendment, it can then proceed directly to President Obama’s desk for signing. Throughout this whole time, the White House and the left in Congress will be using headlines like the one from the New York Times this morning to claim that Obamacare will reduce the deficit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Baucus bill is the only version of Obamacare to get anything close to a deficit neutral nod from CBO and even that is done through creative deception. When it is combined with these other bills, Obamacare is certain to become an even greater budget buster once again. But the left’s entire strategy is to move fast so that a true CBO cost estimate of what Congress is actually voting on never happens.
Conservatives are fighting to make sure this deception is not perpetrated on the American people. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) has introduced legislation that would change Senate rules to require a 72-hour waiting period and an official CBO cost estimate before the Senate was allowed to consider any legislation. If President Obama’s promises to the American people about ethics and transparency mean anything, then he should insist that Congress take its time and allow for a full CBO scoring of health reform.
Quick Hits:
- Army officers gathered at a convention in Washington this week said senior White House officials should not have rebuked Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for saying publicly that a scaled-back war effort would not succeed.
- The chief executive of General Motors, who has received $50 billion in federal bailouts and is owned largely by the U.S. government, said high unemployment rates and other dismal statistics continue to depress car sales.
- In a sign that more banks are under great pressure from the recession, 34 financial institutions did not pay their quarterly dividends in August to the Treasury on funds obtained under the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP).
- The percentage of loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration that are delinquent or in foreclosure hit nearly 8% at the end of June.
- According to the Center for Public Integrity, 10 of the 16 members of the House subcommittee on defense appropriations obtained 30 earmarks in the bill worth $103 million for contractors currently or recently employing former staffers who have become lobbyists.