{"id":301842,"date":"2010-02-10T10:15:11","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T15:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/02\/10\/medicare-pay-cuts-to-doctors-the-latest-patch\/"},"modified":"2010-02-10T10:15:11","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T15:15:11","slug":"medicare-pay-cuts-to-doctors-the-latest-patch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/301842","title":{"rendered":"Medicare Pay Cuts to Doctors: The Latest Patch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Capitol\"Look, we know we’ve been writing forever<\/a> about looming Medicare pay cuts to doctors. So if you’re tired of the subject just stop reading here and scroll down to the next post.<\/p>\n

If you’re still reading, you probably already know that Medicare payments to doctors are set to be cut by 21%<\/a> on March 1. <\/p>\n

But the jobs bill Harry Reid is putting together includes a “short-term patch” that would temporarily block the cuts, the WSJ reports<\/a>. Just how long the patch would last was still being negotiated on Tuesday, the article says.<\/p>\n

The bill is still in draft form and hasn’t been formally released; a draft<\/a> posted by Politico calls for blocking the scheduled pay cuts through the end of September (see p. 107).<\/p>\n

The calculus on this issue is always basically the same. There’s widespread political support for blocking scheduled pay cuts to doctors. But doing so is expensive. So rather than get rid of the formula<\/a> that keeps calling for the cuts — which would require Congress to acknowledge that the country is going to be on the hook for billions of dollars<\/a> in additional Medicare costs — Congress keeps passing these short-term patches.<\/p>\n

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

<\/img><\/a>
\n<\/img><\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look, we know we’ve been writing forever about looming Medicare pay cuts to doctors. So if you’re tired of the subject just stop reading here and scroll down to the next post. If you’re still reading, you probably already know that Medicare payments to doctors are set to be cut by 21% on March 1. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301842","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=301842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}