Bipartisan duo push supercommittee to tackle Medicare payments

By Sam Baker - 10/27/11 11:49 AM ET

A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers say the supercommittee has to deal with Medicare’s payment system for doctors — ideally by scrapping it altogether.

Reps. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) and Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) said the 12-member panel should permanently repeal the Medicare formula, known as the sustainable growth rate (SGR).

“The supercommittee provides us with the opportunity to do this, and to tackle what is a serious part of deficit reduction,” Schwartz told reporters. “If we’re going to serious about budgeting going forward, the cost of SGR repeal ought to be included.”

Schwartz said Democrats are concerned about savings from Medicare being used for deficit reduction rather than reinvested into Medicare. The House was set to vote Thursday on a bill that would cut healthcare spending, and the supercommittee’s deficit-reduction proposals include several cuts to both providers and beneficiaries.

But Congress will inevitably have to address the SGR by the end of the year, either with a long-term solution or yet another stopgap measure to block a 30 percent cut in doctors’ payments. The supercommittee should include the SGR in its proposal “one way or another,” Schwartz said.


The American Medical Association is lobbying especially hard for the supercommittee to permanently repeal the SGR. The group spent more money lobbying in the last quarter than at almost any other time during the Obama administration, including parts of the healthcare reform debate.

Schwartz and Roe want the supercommittee to resist another short-term patch and begin the process of permanently replacing the SGR. The SGR’s scheduled cuts accumulate every time Congress delays them, making each temporary measure more expensive than the one before.

“What a unique opportunity in the history of this country to fix a bad system, because at the end of the day, what we get is an up-or-down vote,” Roe said of the supercommittee.

Schwartz is working on a bill to replace the SGR. But she and Roe agreed that the first step is to repeal it.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity — may never come again,” Roe said.

Ultimately, he said, Medicare has to move away from paying doctors based on how many procedures they perform. He said he envisions a hybrid system in which rural areas use a reformed fee-for-service model and more populated areas with more doctors are paid based on patients’ health.