{"id":4268,"date":"2010-07-16T07:38:15","date_gmt":"2010-07-16T12:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=4268"},"modified":"2010-07-16T07:39:13","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T12:39:13","slug":"facts-belie-gop-fear-mongering-about-coming-medicare-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/07\/16\/facts-belie-gop-fear-mongering-about-coming-medicare-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"Facts Belie GOP Fear-Mongering About Coming Medicare Cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The article <a title=\"McClatchy Article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mcclatchydc.com\/2010\/07\/15\/97579\/facts-belie-gop-fear-mongering.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Facts Belie GOP Fear-Mongering About Coming Medicare Cuts<\/strong><\/a> is written by Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash., the only psychiatrist among the 16 medical doctors serving in Congress.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently the facts also show that the Republicans are the ones who have done what they accuse the Democrats of having done.\u00a0 It is amazing that the Republicans know exactly what frightening things to accuse the Democrats of doing,\u00a0 They only have to go through the list of things that Republicans have done or thought of doing to come up with something,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In 1997, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Balanced  Budget Act (which I voted against) that created something called the  Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, also referred to as SGR. The SGR is an  enormously complicated formula that determines how much Medicare will  pay a physician for the different services they provide seniors during a  doctor&#8217;s visit.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, the formula has been a disastrous  failure and has forced doctors who accept Medicare patients to face  ever-increasing pay cuts. Can you imagine if your boss told you that you  might soon face a pay cut of as much as 20 percent and to expect more  cuts to come down the pike?<\/p>\n<p>To prevent this from happening,  Congress has had no choice but to override those cuts in time increments  from 1 year down to 30 days. And Republicans have been little help in  recognizing the need to correct this very serious problem: just two  years ago, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy had to make a surprise appearance  on the Senate floor amid his battle with brain cancer to cast the  deciding vote to override a pay cut of over 10 percent. His vote was  needed because Republicans apparently had no qualms about significantly  reducing the pay of the doctors who serve our nation&#8217;s senior citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If Republicans are so fearful of cutting Medicare, why did they come up with the above legislation in 1997?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The article Facts Belie GOP Fear-Mongering About Coming Medicare Cuts is written by Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash., the only psychiatrist among the 16 medical doctors serving in Congress. Apparently the facts also show that the Republicans are the ones who have done what they accuse the Democrats of having done.\u00a0 It is amazing that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4268","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4270,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4268\/revisions\/4270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}