Congress Kicks the Can.... Progress?

For the 17th consecutive time, Congress has put aside their differences, stopped the bickering for a moment, joined hands and, in the spirit of unity, passed legislation to avoid a deep pay cut to doctors who see Medicare patients.

And if you haven't been keeping up to speed on the Affordable Care Act, (a.k.a. Obama-Care) numbers, there are now a lot of doctors who see medicare patients.

Without this inspiring act of procrastination by Congress, a 24 percent cut in the payments doctors receive from treating medicare enrollees would have taken effect starting this month, due to what almost everyone agrees is a flawed payment formula. Congress has been working at the speed of congress for over a decade to repeal this thing called the sustainable growth rate formula, or SGR, and eventually replace it with a system that would pay doctors based on how healthy they keep their patients.

Nobody likes it, penalizing doctors at a time when almost every aspect of being a physician demands higher costs and expenses. Efforts to undo those cuts have come to be known as the "doc fix." And finding the money to pay for each fix has become an annual headache for doctors, lawmakers and seniors as congress continually waits until the eleventh hour to finally agree to do.... nothing.

No rate changes, no acts to underwrite the 10 year, $180 billion cost, no changes to the formula, no incentives for doctors to base care on anything other then number of treatments, and no implementation of the rate changes that were designed to make the medicare system more solvent.

This is the definition of a do nothing congress, when they actually congratulate themselves on passing legislation that accomplishes absolutely no changes to the status quo. Lawmakers once again turned to the temporary delay, which has physician groups as furious as fans of a season ending cliff hanger, having to wait another year to learn their fate. Worse yet, there are several medical standards updates that keep getting delayed alongside the payment changes that have the industry left in a holding pattern. 

I congratulate our legislature on once again displaying new mind boggling ways of why the opposite of progress is congress.