The Hill News

The president took an extra week to develop his budget, but the extra time was apparently not enough to yield Medicare policies that could produce real savings. The 2013 budget released today relies on the same tired proposals that we have seen previously. Provider payment cuts, delicately referred to as “modifications,” account for $267 billion in savings over the next decade. For a program that will cost taxpayers more than $6.7 trillion, this is a disappointingly modest savings targetâ€"and even so, it is not likely to be met.
 
We have eight years of proof that Congress will never allow those payment reductions to go into effect. Unm! entioned in the budget is the little matter of the 27.4% reduction in Medicare payments to physicians, scheduled to take effect on March 1. Whenever physician payments grow more quickly than the economy, Medicare is required to cut their fees using the “sustainable growth rate” formula. However, Congress has overridden those formula-driven payment cuts every year since 2003 and the uncollected bills have mounted up. It is now ludicrous to think that Congress could ever allow such a large payment reduction to take effect. It is equally ludicrous to think that Congress would enforce sizeable reductions in payments to hospitals and other health facilities on top of the hundreds of billions in reductions already levied on them by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

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