Tag: Supermajority

Who Will Pay For the Doc Pay Fix?

Merrill Goozner

Published 11/25/11 in the Fiscal Times

Holiday cheer and bipartisan bonhomie are still possible on Capitol Hill.

For evidence, one need only look at the so-called “doc fix,” where Congress every year overrides a previous effort at health care cost control to ensure physicians get paid at least as much as they did the year before.  Expect another present to arrive at physicians’ offices sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, now that the Super Committee has failed to permanently resolve the issue as part of Medicare’s contribution to long-term deficit control.

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ACA Turns One

Jim Hufford

First published 3/23/11 on Organon

The good news is that it’s the Affordable Care Act’s first birthday. The bad news is that the ACA is sick and unloved, and its long-term prognosis is grim.

Nobody ever thought the ACA was perfect, and health reformers have by and large defended it on the grounds that it was a good start towards tackling the real problems in our healthcare system. Once the political storm surrounding the legislation subsided, the thinking went, we would be able to get down to the real, technocratic work of crafting evidence-based reforms that addressed the underlying crisis of escalating costs. As Don Taylor has written, we were “obviously wrong about that, and politically, the ACA remains toxic.”

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