Senators Cut Medicare Deal For Doctors, Leave Unemployment Issue Unfinished

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/18/senators-cut-medicare-dea_n_617548.html

Republican and Democratic Senate leaders cut a deal Friday to prevent a 21 percent pay cut for doctors who see Medicare patients, resolving one of the major sticking points from a stalled bill to reauthorize several expired domestic aid programs.

"Sometimes the Senate can be terribly disconcerting, aggravating, but that's the way the Senate is," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on the Senate floor. "I'm glad we were able to work this out. This is extremely important for everybody and we're going to move on with the rest of the information in the bill and try to finish that at the earliest possible date."

The deal will preserve the so-called "Doc Fix" for six months while adhering to a Republican requirement that the measure's $6.5 billion cost not add to the deficit. But the House has to act before the law takes effect; Medicare announced shortly after the Senate acted that it would begin processing June claims at the reduced rate.

The Doc Fix lapsed at the beginning of the month, but the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services delayed the pay cut until Friday. Extended unemployment benefits and subsidies for laid-off workers to buy health insurance also lapsed at the beginning of the month. Since then, 903,000 people who've been out of work for longer than six months have found themselves ineligible for extended benefits originally provided by the 2009 stimulus bill.

"Clearly, the doctors have more lobbyists than the unemployed do," said Judy Conti of the National Employment Law Project. "While I have no objection to doctors being paid at appropriate levels for their skill and important work, this is a prospective solution to a problem that would decrease, not eliminate, their income. Currently, however, the UI programs have lapsed, over 900,000 long-term unemployed workers are without any income right now, and that number grows to 1.2 million next week."


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