GOVERNMENTCurrent Medicare reform bill only a start, not a finishIf history is any indication, the legislation will need a lot of correction.By Markian Hawryluk, AMNews staff. Nov. 3, 2003. Washington -- Although Congress has yet to complete a Medicare reform bill that would add an outpatient prescription drug benefit, experts are already predicting that lawmakers will need to fix it if it passes. And that's not out of the ordinary. "We have in this country a long and cherished tradition of enacting seriously flawed legislation that we then spend the next decade cleaning up and repairing," said Robert Reischauer, PhD, senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Dr. Reischauer was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995 and is on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. It was on his watch that Congress repealed the Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, the last time lawmakers seriously considered a Medicare prescription drug benefit. But Dr. Reischauer said mending laws, not overturning them, is the approach that Congress usually takes. The pressure to develop a far-reaching bill in a limited amount of time in a politically charged atmosphere with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake is what usually drives passage of faulty legislation. Congress is still revisiting policy from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. That ended up cutting billions of dollars more in Medicare spending than was intended, prompting Congress to pass the Balanced Budget Relief Act of 1999 and the Benefits Improvement and Protection Act of 2000. The budget act introduced the sustainable growth rate formula for calculating Medicare physician updates. Earlier this year, lawmakers averted a second year of deep cuts in physician payment stemming from errors in estimates used to calculate the SGR. Nevertheless, unless Congress acts again this year, physicians will face a 4.2% cut in Medicare payments as a result of the law's language. [...]Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2003 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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