{"id":264625,"date":"2010-02-02T10:07:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T15:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/02\/02\/medicare-pay-cuts-to-doctors-a-five-year-fix\/"},"modified":"2010-02-02T10:07:42","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T15:07:42","slug":"medicare-pay-cuts-to-doctors-a-five-year-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/264625","title":{"rendered":"Medicare Pay Cuts to Doctors: A Five-Year Fix?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Capitol\"Medcare payments to doctors were supposed to fall by 21% at the start of this year, but Congress passed a last-minute, two-month patch<\/a> to block the cuts. Now, a five-year patch could be on the way.<\/p>\n

In the past several years, short-term patches of scheduled Medicare pay cuts to doctors — usually of one year — have become standard operating procedure. The AMA and the AARP want Congress to permanently repeal the payment formula<\/a> that keeps calling for the cuts, but doing so would require Congress to confront some ugly truths about the budget — without the cuts, the nation will spend hundreds of billions more on Medicare over the next decade.<\/p>\n

The Senate recently passed a pay-as-you-go law that would require balancing all new spending with tax increases or spending cuts. But, as the Hill<\/a> noted yesterday, that legislation included a loophole of sorts: Congress can allocate an additional $82 billion for physician payments without having to find new sources of revenue or savings. That’s not enough to scrap the current payment system altogether, but it could be enough to block scheduled pay cuts for five years, the Hill says.<\/p>\n

A bill to permanently block the cuts failed in the Senate last year<\/a>, in large part because senators couldn’t figure out how to pay for it.<\/p>\n

Photo: Associated Press<\/em><\/p>\n

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Medcare payments to doctors were supposed to fall by 21% at the start of this year, but Congress passed a last-minute, two-month patch to block the cuts. Now, a five-year patch could be on the way. In the past several years, short-term patches of scheduled Medicare pay cuts to doctors — usually of one year […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}