Although the editors of the Washington Post are right to take note of the incipient agreement on abolishing the always-ignored Sustainable Growth Rate in Congress—that’s the provision that induces the annual exercise in cowardice, the “doc fix”:
THE HOUSE of Representatives is on course to pass a major piece of Medicare legislation with strong support from the leadership and rank and file of both parties. Yes, you read that right: On Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote on a package that permanently eliminates the expensive annual budgetary charade known as the “doc fix,†while enacting tens of billions of dollars worth of structural reforms to the massive program for seniors — and providing a two-year, $5.6 billion dollop of funding to an important children’s health-care program to boot. For their labors in moving this bill to the brink of passage, we’d pat House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) on the back — if they weren’t already doing so themselves.
I don’t think they appreciate how weak a victory it is. They try to rationalize the move as the beginning of a process:
Arguably, ending the doc fix helps pave the way for more reforms because of all the legislative time and attention that will no longer be wasted on that exercise.
That’s nonsense. The House has merely agreed to say out loud what has been left unsaid for the last 15 years: spending more money on Medicare is easy. It will always be ready to spend more money on Medicare.
Despite the rejoicing over the slower rate of growth, Medicare spending continues to grow at a multiple of the non-healthcare rate of inflation, GDP, and incomes. As a matter of basic math that can’t continue indefinitely and I would submit that failing to address the basic, structural problems in our healthcare policy is already having an adverse effect on economic growth and jobs.
Effective reform, reform worthy of the name, will necessarily involve making hard decisions rather than easy ones. What the House has passed is just more of what we’ve been doing for the last half century.
