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.
The secret board of shadowy figures is in session. And it appears that our current President is pushing for a Sith like power grab that, among other things, would form a super-international law the supersedes our own.
Earlier this week, leaked memos with the contents of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) highlighted issues still being disputed among trade representatives from the 12 countries including the United States. There was a hope that these negotiations would come to fruition before the end of the year, but lucky for us they are moving at the speed of a bunch of politicians trying to work together and presently don't appear to be ready to meet their U.S. imposed end of year deadline.
Even failing to meet this penciled in deadline is not stopping these negotiations. One can only hope that the added time will allow more media attention and scrutiny towards what is happening. Everyone from Ed Shultz to Alex Jones is speaking out against these talks. Rep. Alan Grayson is one of a few members of congress that was granted access to review at least some notes from these negotiations and he summarized the whole thing by saying "What this amounts to is giving away our sovereignty as Americans in exchange for nothing."
We have only seen a small portion of the areas that these talks encompass, the proverbial tip of the iceberg if you will, but among these issues include giving extra authority to corporations and non-governmental organizations, similar to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The U.S. delegation’s continued push of this Titanic of a law to allow greater powers under new international laws has been a source of conflict among many of the other countries. One of the most controversial provisions in the talks includes new corporate empowerment language (also apparently insisted upon by the U.S. government), which would allow foreign companies to challenge laws or regulations in a privately run 'third party' international court. Under World Trade Organization treaties, this political power to contest government law is reserved for sovereign nations. In layman's terms, we would allow an internationally appointed power to potentially change and alter U.S. trade law, and you thought the bureaucracy of the federal courts was bad. Using this approach to resolve copyright and patient infringing would be like giving a local mob boss a tank to collect the $100 the guy down the street owes you. There's no real guarantee that the $100 will make it's way back to you, and now another guy in the neighborhood has a tank.
Other points of conflict that remain certain include environmental protections, labor standards, financial regulation, and intellectual property rights that many groups say would undermine some of our basic freedoms. These regulations also include criminalizing unintentional infringements on copyright, increasing patents on medicine from 17 to 20 years, which could lead to higher prescription drug costs and provisions that could undermine climate control regulations in the U.S.. Largely, what these new rules are difficult to gleam because we don’t know due to the almost all-encompassing secrecy that prevails over the negotiation process. From what I can see, the only up side is for corporations interested in either moving operations to lower income countries to lower their costs, or companies interested in suing everyone over intellectual property infringements.
The part I have trouble putting my finger on is the motivation of this administration. While secrecy remains about the majority of the TPP, President Obama continues to push for Fast Track Authority. Fast Track would grant him significant powers and allow him to railroad TPP through Congress without a committee hearing, amendments, and limited debate time. Because if there is any way to ensure that congress passes a well thought out piece of legislation, it's by having them pass it before they even have time to read the thing.
It makes one wonder the motivation for something that seems against our countries interest in so many ways, to be held in secrecy by a President who has vowed to be the most transparent administration, that would lay the groundwork for jobs to be shipped overseas easier than ever, that seems to be getting the largest amount of resistance from his own party, what could be his motivation? As someone whose life was shaken up pretty hard in my youth when NAFTA became law, I take offense to the idea that free trade has any true benefit. Our trade deficit has grown between Canada and Mexico from almost a perfect even to over $150 Billion in not our favor.
Let's put on our tinfoil hats as we wait and see what kind of international law results from these secretive meetings. Let's watch as our leaders tell us we're crazy for thinking or believing that there is a secret board of shadowy figures at the same time they are meeting in closed sessions. Let us marvel as the richest country keeps doing everything thing we can to throw our money on a trade ship heading towards other countries. Let us hope that whatever motivations are moving the President to pursue this path in this aggressive manner is not taking root with the majority of congress when the brief window for them to do something about it arrives.
"In order to break down the separation of powers and ram through their appointees to the judicial branch, President Bush and the Republican leadership want to eliminate a 200-year-old American rule saying that every member of the Senate can rise to say their piece and speak on behalf of the people who sent them here." - Harry Reid, 2005
"As I said at the time, the nuclear option was the most important issue I've ever worked on in my entire career, because if that had gone forward it would have destroyed the Senate as we know it," - Harry Reid, 2009
“The Senate is a living thing, and to survive it must change, as it has over the history of this great country,” Harry Reid, 2013
Not since people trounced on President Bush's inability to enunciate like a proper N'eastener has Washington had so much buzz over a nucular nuclear issue.
The US Senate, under the leadership of democratic majority leader Harry Reid, just pushed the proverbial big red button and passed the so-called “nuclear option,” which makes executive branch and judicial nominees at all levels under the Supreme Court of the United States no longer subject to filibuster. The new rules only requiring a simple 51 person majority over the higher bar of 60 votes.
Like so many other laws and regulations that get passed in D.C. Nobody is actually coming forward and claiming that they wanted this new rule. Time is instead spent blaming others for forcing their hand to do something they didn't want to do.
Harry Reid is blaming Republicans, calling them obstructionists. An accusation that hasn't been thrown out in the senate chambers since about 5 minutes beforehand. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is blaming people who don't want to listen to opposition, when asked to clarify, Sen. McConnell replied "What?" John McCain is blaming the babies of the senate, which by his interpretation is anyone born after 1918. President Obama is blaming insurance companies, then someone corrected him that this wasn't about Obamacare, then he blamed a few bad apples in the IRS, people again said he was mistaking this for the IRS targeting scandal, the President then said it was a program that began under Bush's Department of Justice with the name "Wide Receiver", when the same people in the room started to correct him again, the President became flustered and said "Whatever it was that just happened, I didn't know about it until I will read about it in the paper tomorrow." before storming off the stage.
What does this move mean for the American people? Well, it establishes that rules in the senate don't actually mean anything, so the next time a senator says "We can't do that, it's against the rules." You know it's hogwash, or 'malarchy' as Biden would say. They just need 51 people to want something bad enough to break the rules, by which of course I mean change the rules. Also, this could also usher in a new era of political appointees being held on a shorter leash, since the process of replacing them would be considerably easier. Finally, it's another step towards setting a precedent that minority parties have no real power in congress. Merge those two guiding principles together and you have a form of government that seems a far cry from a constitutional republic.
And if Democrats think it's a win-win to get their nominations through, I'd like to see how they react when people from both parties in either chamber attempt to sit down at the negotiating table next month to has out the next short term grand bargain to avoid another shut down. With the President vowing to veto pretty much anything the house passes and the senate saying today they have no more need for a minority party. The stage is set for cold shouldering that will make the last set of negotiations over a government shutdown seem like an epic battle between the Human Torch and barrel of napalm.
For a final thought, what are the guesses as to how quickly the same majority will vote to re-invoke the 60 person rule if the Democrats loose enough seats in next year's election to place Republicans back into the majority? My guess is that will make this new Appellate Court vetting process seem like a Baywatch beach running scene by comparison.
