Former Bush Official: Medicare “Doc Fix” A Tribute To Big Spender Henry Waxman

Doug Badger, former Deputy Assistant to President Bush on Legislative Affairs, Staff Director of the Senate Policy Committee, and senior official at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has harsh words for the so-called Medicare “doc fix” that was rushed through the House of Representatives last month:

The $141 billion health care bill that cleared the House last month and that is expected to win Senate approval next week is a tribute from the GOP-controlled Congress to former Congressman Henry Waxman, a man who worked tirelessly – and with great success – to expand health care-related welfare spending.

The bill (H.R. 2) increases Medicare payments to physicians, largely by replacing one complicated and flawed formula with another. It directs the army of bureaucrats who populate CMS cube farms to soldier on with their futile, half-century-long quest to implement a workable system of administered pricing.

Meanwhile, at the National Journal, Dylan Scott asserts that winning the “doc fix” is “the end for Washington’s most frenzied lobbying extravaganza.” Oh, really? Are all those lobbyists demanding immediate Senate passage of this deficit-financed bill trying to put themselves out of work? I doubt it. They know perfectly well that their services will be in even higher demand when Medicare

starts developing the new bureaucratic mechanisms that will be used to determine doctors’ Medicare pay in the future (if this bill passes). The real, unstated explanation for the urgency with which healthcare lobbyists are demanding passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act is not to improve the quality of value of physicians’ services to seniors, or even to “fix” doctors’ pay, but to get huge bipartisan majorities in Congress to swallow the idea that they should expand the Medicare entitlement without cutting spending elsewhere, through offsets or sequestration. The first murder is the hardest, they say. Subsequent ones get easier and easier. If this bill passes as written, we can never expect serious Medicare reform from the current politicians in Congress.

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