Better Conservatives Needed

Robert Moffit / June 26, 2008

The Left is winning the big health care policy victories with the help of rank and file GOP members and their feckless Republican Leadership in Congress.

The latest example is the enactment of H.R.6331, The Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act. In spite of threatened Presidential veto, the bill passed the House this week by a lopsided 355 to 59 vote. The bill does nothing at all to reform the Medicare dinosaur, and every provision simply reinforces its worst features, bureaucratic central planning and its mind numbing price controls. Because physicians are facing a 10.6 percent Medicare payment cut under Congress’s own administrative pricing formula, the House voted to stop its own handiwork from actually taking effect (good idea), but of, course, it preserved the very administrative pricing formula that causes this annual Chinese fire drill in the House and Senate (bad idea). So, this is Victory #1 for the Left’s prized Medicare’s pricing regime. This means that Congress will continue to exercise even greater control over physicians’ livelihood next year and the year after that, when the magnitude of the congressionally ordained and scheduled payment cuts become even larger. (more…)