Bipartisan House team attempting a permanent 'doc fix'

Did something get into the House drinking water supply? First we have a Republican actually trying to protect Planned Parenthood, and now one is working with a Democrat on one of the stickier perpetual issues on the Hill, the Medicare "doc fix," the reimbursement rate for physicians that has been broken for years.

Reps. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.) and Joe Heck (R-Nev.) introduced a bill Wednesday to reform how Medicare pays healthcare providers and to avoid a cut to reimbursement rates on Jan. 1.

The bipartisan measure would repeal Medicare's current reimbursement formula and replace it with a new system of payment models. It would also give doctors small boosts in payment rates for four years.

Money for the changes would coming from war savings from troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan'a move Republicans have opposed in the past as a "Ponzi scheme."

The "doc fix" is the shorthand used to describe the nearly annual bill Congress passes to override another law they passed, the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, which was enacted in 1996 to try to keep Medicare costs under control. Almost every year since, it has been overridden by Congress because it doesn't actually work. Another short-term fix passed in February, along with the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance extensions, and like those two programs, it's set to expire at the end of this year.

Democrats pushed this very funding solution for a permanent fix during the extension negotiations last year, and were rebuffed, even though a Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), the co-chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, the group that usually takes the lead on health issues, flirted briefly with accepting it just to make the issue finally go away.

So at least one Republican is flirting with it again. Given how quickly Gingrey was shut down last year, though, it's not likely to be happening during this session. It might, however, provide the starting point for discussions come lame duck time, when the issue has to be resolved all over again.