House passes ‘first real’ Medicare reform bill

Boehner, R-West Chester Twp., called the bill the “first real” reform of the major federal entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security in “nearly two decades,” adding the bill would put Medicare on a “more sound financial footing.”

“Over the long-term — the next 20, 30, 40 years — the bill will produce hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of durable savings for taxpayers,” said Boehner.

Despite the easy bipartisan vote, some conservatives insisted the bill will add to the deficit in the short term. Michael Needham, chief executive officer of the conservative non-profit Heritage Action, said the bill “increases spending in the near term for promises of woefully inadequate long-term reductions.”

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that the bill would increase the federal deficit by $141 million during the next 11 years. But the CBO also predicted that the bill would cost $1 billion less during the next decade than if Congress simply continued to freeze physician payments.

The bill, colloquially deemed the “Doc Fix,” attempts to rein in rising costs for Medicare, which provides health care to more than 54 million elderly people. Medicare spending is projected by the CBO to grow from $535 billion in 2013 to more than $1 trillion in 2023.

The bill would scrap the current formula and increase a physician’s pay for Medicare patients by 0.5 percent every year for the next five years. If Congress does not act, physicians would face a 21 percent payment cut beginning next month.

With the bill, lawmakers attempted to devise a solution for a problem that has be-deviled them since 1997 which limited physician payments. Because that payment formula was so tight, Congress repeatedly had to pass an increase for physician payments.

“The bill we passed is not perfect,” said Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Twp. “There’s much more work that needs to be done, but it is a good precedent as we work to fix our broken entitlement system.”

Republican Jim Jordan of Urbana was the only Ohio lawmaker to vote against the bill.