Jonathan Chait at The New Republic catches a winger propagandist trying to misinform the public. The issue is the so-called "doctor fix" which takes back the big cut in doctor reimbursement for Medicare that was made in 1997. Congress passes the fix every year but the wingers claim that the CBO analysis doesn't take this into account and used the reduced payments when evaluating the health care plan.
I'll let Chait take it from here:
[Jeffrey H.]Anderson proceeds to cite the Congressional Budget Office as evidence that the cost of the doc fix is being used to help fund the Affordable Care Act. He writes:
The CBO begs to differ: “The provisions that would result in the largest budget savings include these: permanent reductions in the annual updates to Medicare’s payment rates for most services in the fee-for-service sector . . . yielding budgetary savings of $186 billion over 10 years.” That’s the physician pay cut.
Anderson provided no link or citation for this quote. It turns out to come from a December 19 CBO letter (page 10) to Harry Reid, assessing the cost of the Senate health care bill, which is not actually the final version. But never mind that. Anderson, if you noticed, inserts an ellipses into the quote from the CBO. Here is the entire quote. I've bold-faced the part omitted by Anderson:
Permanent reductions in the annual updates to Medicare’s payment rates for most services in the fee-for-service sector (other than physicians’ services), yielding budgetary savings of $186 billion over 10 years.
Did you catch that? Anderson used ellipses to remove the part of the quote that disproves his entire claim. He removed the part that says "other than physicians' services," and then wrote, "That's the physician pay cut."
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