Hot Air » CBO: Doc fix will cost more than anyone thought

Hot Air » CBO: Doc fix will cost more than anyone thought

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure. The ObamaCare bill signed by Barack Obama after getting hastily and repeatedly rewritten in backroom negotiations by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid turns out to cost a lot more than they admitted — and in new areas that keep appearing after its passage. The CBO now estimates the “doctor fix” that Pelosi and Reid promised to the AMA in exchange for their support will cost much more than the Democratic leaders admitted, emphases mine:

The debate over what to do about Medicare payments to doctors continues. Physicans have been lobbying ”to repeal the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, which triggers automatic Medicare payment cuts if spending rises above a certain level,” CongressDailyreports. Those cuts have been put off for years.

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office said that just freezing current Medicare payment rates to doctors would likely cost nearly $276 billion through 2020, a 33 percent increase from legislation that would “accomplish that goal introduced late last year by Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., estimated to cost $207 billion at the time” according to CongressDaily. ”Aides on both sides of the aisle attributed the cost increase to assumptions of an improved economy, which tends to add more to the cost of health services, as well as demographic changes that foresee increased numbers of retirees in 2020 over the previous year.”