One Republican is pushing to apply “pay-as-you-go” rules to the Medicare payment reform bill the Senate hopes to pass this week.
There’s rare bipartisan consensus on a bill to once and for all fix Medicare’s flawed doctor payment formula that Congress has annually voted to override for more than a decade in what’s popularly known as the “doc fix,” to ensure doctors’ payments don’t dramatically plummet.
Th problem is, in order to achieve that bipartisan agreement, lawmakers opted to pay for only about one-third of the legislation’s total cost. Some conservatives are revolting, saying the full cost of the measure should be covered before they’ll vote for it.
One of those is Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. He said this week he’ll offer an amendment that would require Congress to pay the full cost under its normal “pay-as-you-go” rules. Those rules, commonly known as “paygo,” have been adopted by Congress but are not law and can be ignored if lawmakers choose.
“My amendment would not change or delay anything else in the bill — doctors and seniors won’t notice any difference,” Lee wrote in an op-ed published Sunday by the Deseret News. “It would just require Congress to budget for the costs like we promised we would.”
It’s unclear whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will allow amendments to be proposed to the bill, although Minority Leader Harry Reid says he wants them. The Senate has until Wednesday to either pass the permanent measure or enact another short-term “doc fix,” or Medicare payments to doctors will drop by 21 percent.
