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Congress is at an impasse over how to fix a perennial problem in Medicare.

Just about every year a formula glitch threatens to cut payments to doctors who treat seniors and the disabled. And just about every year Congress cancels the cut. This year lawmakers are complaining about the bill because it’s not paid for. But, despite what both Republicans and Democrats are claiming, that’s nothing new.

Permanent Fix Falls Short

Rather than do another one or two year patch for the Medicare doctor pay cut problem, Senate Democrats had wanted to fix the problem permanently. But their bill couldn’t even make it to the Senate floor – it fell short on its first procedural test last Wednesday by 13 votes. The reason cited by virtually every opponent was that the bill’s $250 billion, ten-year cost wasn’t paid for with other spending cuts or increased taxes.

New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg is among the opponents of the bill. “We’ve only done yearly fixes in this area, the doctor fix, because it’s a pretty difficult number to always pay for, but we have always paid for it,” he said on CNN last Sunday.

Except that Congress hasn’t always paid for it. In fact, when Republicans were in charge, they did cancel the Medicare cuts to doctors, but rarely paid for them. Just before turning control of Congress back to the Democrats at the end of 2006, Republicans actually tucked legislation to cancel the next year’s doctor pay cut into a catch-all tax bill that wasn’t paid for either. And then-Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg was one of the people who complained the loudest.

“You just have to ask yourself how we, as a party, got to this point, where we have a leadership which is going to ram down the throats of our party the biggest budget buster in the history of the Congress under Republican leadership,” said Gregg back in 2006.

Bipartisan Memory Loss

But Republicans don’t have a lock on short-term memory problems. Here’s how White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded when he was asked about the issue last Thursday: “The cut in payments to doctors is something that is to be implemented every year; and gets fixed every year for the past six years. The president included in his budget fixing for and paying for that fix,” said Gibbs.

Except Gibbs was only half-right. President Obama’s budget does propose to fix the payment problem in that it would cancel next year’s Medicare cut for doctors and cuts into the future. But it doesn’t propose to pay for the added costs.

In fact, back in March, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag testified before a House Committee that the proposed fix could cause the federal deficit to be as much as $400 billion higher over the next decade.

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