.....
So, here is the story. TRICARE and NAF are not certain to be approved under the existing bill about to be signed. Now, why is this? They’ve been working on these bills for in excess of a year, and this is the first we are hearing of it? Well, no, actually, Representative Buyer has been talking about the effects for quite a while, but no one really listened. This is not really to praise Representative Buyer as much as it is to say that no one on the Hill seems to be listening to anyone. Think back on all the important bills that Congress has passed in its days. The Civil Rights Acts, Medicare creation, some of the New Deal Bills. How many of them had one party voting exclusively one way, and the other party splitting its vote and yet the party that voted together lost? I’ve never heard it. Not one Republican broke ranks on this bill, and some Dems, fearful of the vengeance of their constituents voted “No.” What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Now, I would take grave exception to the VFW saying that the Democrats, “Betrayed Veterans”….Actually, I think they knew exactly what they were doing, and fully expect them to make the fixes sometime in the next week or two. So, that being the case, why wasn’t this fixed earlier?
Well, that takes the discussion in a different direction as well. For those who don’t know how Medicare Reimbursements work, if you are on Medicare, you go to a doctor and for each procedure, the Gov’t will pay a certain amount to that Doctor. That figure is notably less than what the doctor would charge other patients. If the doctor is incredibly busy, he will forego all Medicare patients since he can charge more to those with private insurance. The Congress, in an effort to cut down our ballooning budget has been trying to further cut the rates that the Government pays out at, and this has expected results….Less doctors will take Medicare patients.
Now, the cuts are already in as law, but many Members of Congress know that the reimbursement rates are too low, so every year they vote to freeze the drop. And this is part of the “Doctor Fix” that you hear about all the time. But what happened was that President Obama and the Democratic Members of the House are pushing a new mantra of “Fiscal Responsibility” and “Lowering the deficit.” And so, they set an artificial ceiling of 1 Trillion dollars for this bill. One would like to think that this number has some concrete meaning. I mean, why $1 Trillion and not $936 Billion? No reason at all, that was the number they settled on.
So what happens next is that the Congressional Budget Office is brought in to referee the situation. The Majority said that they would like, W, X, Y, and Z in the bill, and the CBO said “Well, that would cost you $1.5 Trillion” or so. So Congress sent it back and said, “Fine, drop X and Z.” Bingo, CBO comes back at $900+ Billion, just below the artificial threshold. Now, once that is passed, Congress will go back and say, “But we need the X and Z done now, or our ___[Veterans etc]___ will have an unfair burden.”
Everyone will vote for it, because no one wants the veterans to be left out in the cold. And Voila! it passes, without Congress ever having to have added it in the initial bill, and thus keeping the initial bill under the magic number.
http://burnpit.legion.org/2010/03/no...ct-you-part-i/