President’s Budget Contains One Sorry Excuse of a Doc Fix

Kathryn Nix / February 16, 2011

President Obama has received praise for including a two-year Medicare “doc fix” in his FY 2012 budget proposal, but hold the applause.

Every year, physician reimbursement for treating Medicare patients is scheduled to decrease according to the “sustainable growth rate” formula. This complex and unworkable policy is intended to create savings, but Congress has delayed the cuts for years, since allowing such dramatic cuts would cause many physicians to drop Medicare patients altogether, resulting in severely reduced access to care for seniors.

Physicians and patients need a permanent solution to this ongoing problem. Instead, the President’s budget continues to kick the can down the road by “paying for” a two-year fix only. This is not acceptable. Finding savings to extend the “doc fix” is the right thing to do, but the President’s budget uses long-term spending reductions over the next decade to pay for a short-term fix. Those savings won’t, then, be available to pay for preserving payment rates for physicians in those years—and that’s if they even occur at all. (more…)