It’s over, done, finished. For a few months, anyway. With the overwhelming Congressional vote to override Pres Bush’s veto of the Medicare bill (keeping physician reimbursement levels and cutting subsidies for health plans’ Medicare Advantage and Private Fee For Service), the pols can now move on to other issues.
But while they’re working on oil drilling and war funding and education and trade, the ‘solution’ will merely serve to kick the problem further down the road. And when next we round the corner, we’ll find that the ball has gotten much heavier (docs are scheduled for a 20%+ cut. We’ll also find a rejuvenated physician lobby, one with a renewed strength and sophistication, marked by the ‘partnership’ with AARP.
The Senate vote was an even louder repudiation of Bush’s position than the original vote, with four more GOP Senators joining all their Democratic colleagues and seventeen other Republicans.
Twenty-one Republicans voted to cut health plan subsidies and restore physician reimbursement. Twenty-one.
In the House, 153 Republicans (24 more than voted ‘aye’ originally’) joined the 230 Democrats to overturn the veto.
Some (including Shadowfax) have said physicians don’t have pull in Washington. If you don’t believe in the power of the AMA now, I respectfully suggest you go back, do the math, and ask the GOP members of the House and Senate what made them change their votes.
The next time Congress tackles Medicare, you can be sure health plans’ influence on Capitol Hill will have waned; no, diminished; no, disappeared; no, that’s not quite right either. Suffice it to say that health plans lost this round, and lost it badly. And they have no one to blame but themselves. Appalled by stories of health plans canceling policies, wildly overpaying executives, and cutting back on coverage and physician compensation, Congresspeople found it pretty easy to take a few billion out of health plans and give it to docs.
As Bob Laszewski said when asked about health plans, “Now they have zero political capital, and they’re just going to have it done to them next year.”
When it will hurt a lot more. By digging in their heels, health plans likely lost their last best chance to play a dominant role in future health care reform negotiations. Instead, they will likely find themselves with a seat or two at the table, but those seats will be at the far end, away from the powerful and influential.
Jul
16
This has been a great day for the little people. Their doctors will still be available. The health plans have lost a lot. On the MA’s, they gave a bone with a little bit of meat; no steak. The G. O. P. should read G. O. C. Government of the corporations.
I like the notion of a “rejuvenated” physicians’ lobby and I hope you’re right. My cynical side still points out that this is the only clean win for the physicians in as long as I have been following health care politics, and it was after a dogfight, when it should have been a walk-over (just like the previous three SGR fixes were). It is nice to see what can happen when the docs (and allied groups) are focused and united. The proof indeed will be forthcoming in the 111th Congress.
The health plans are drowning in their own weight and ignorance. I am happy to read that someone sees them in this light as well. After spending six years going to capitol hill to bring reform ideas to the forefront, it is quite apparent that the health plans are stuck in a quandry. The very laws they had passed to monopolize the market are killing them now….RIP to the health insurance plans over the next five years.
In any other business their practices would be called extortion!