Every time I read an article or blog post by a progressive health care wonk, I’m reminded of William Safire’s famous description of Hillary Clinton. Like the hapless Mrs. Clinton, these people all seem to be congenital liars.
Predictably, Maggie Mahar is a representative example. At Kevin MD, she simulates a reasonable discussion of Medicare physician reimbursements, but parrots the usual partisan whoppers. Here’s her revisionist history of SGR:
In 1997, Congress enacted a so-called “sustainable growth rate� (SGR) mechanism to keep Medicare physician reimbursement rates in check.
Mahar then “explains” why the Democrats who control Congress don’t repeal this bad piece of legislation:
Because too few of our elected representative possess the chutzpah to stand up and say that blind across-the-board cuts were an extraordinarily dumb idea in the first place.
She neglects to mention that the SGR formula was part of the “Balanced Budget Act of 1997,� signed into law by Bill Clinton and touted ever since by progressives as an example of fiscal responsibility.
She also fails to mention that SGR was enacted to correct the mess created by the “Volume Performance Standard� enacted by a Democrat Congress in 1989. She does, however, add the following whopper to her tale:
[The Democrat-controlled] Congress did not attempt to repeal the SGR as part of the Affordable Care Act because conservatives would have argued that this made reform too expensive.
This is pure horse manure, of course. The Dems left SGR in place so they could maintain the dual fictions that Obamacare would cost less than $1 trillion and would reduce the federal budget deficit.
No one with any sense believes either of these fairy tales. And neither does Mahar. However, like every progressive policy wonk that I know of, she earns her paycheck by prevarication.
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