Medicare doctors won't take pay cut after veto override

Last update: July 15, 2008 - 8:13 PM

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President Bush on Tuesday sought to block a bill aimed at forestalling a cut in payments to doctors taking care of Medicare patients, but Congress quickly overrode his veto.

The House voted 383-41 to override the veto, while the Senate voted 70-26, in both cases far more than the two-thirds necessary to block the president's action.

With organized medicine promoting the popular measure in an election year, Republicans broke heavily from the White House. A total of 153 House Republicans voted to defy the White House, an additional 24 Republicans from a June 24 vote that started the momentum toward passage of the Medicare doctors' bill Tuesday. Twenty-one Senate Republicans voted for the bill this time, including four senators who had voted "nay" in the two previous Medicare votes.

The Medicare bill marks the third occasion, along with the recent farm bill and a water resources bill, that bills have become law despite Bush's veto pen. Overall, Bush has vetoed 12 bills during his presidency.

At issue Tuesday was how the government should respond to a reduction in Medicare doctors' fees mandated by a formula that required the cuts if certain spending targets were not reached. Under the formula, a 10.6 percent cut in fees for doctors was supposed to go into effect on July 1, but Congress overwhelmingly voted instead to reduce the reimbursement to insurance companies that serve Medicare beneficiaries under its managed-care program. Those reductions would allow the postponement of the pay cut to doctors for 18 months but would cost the insurers $14 billion over five years.

Bush said the cuts to insurers would harm the managed-care program, which his administration sees as giving seniors more choices and eventually leading to lower health costs for the federal government.

Health-care experts said Congress is simply moving the problem down the road, since lawmakers will be confronted within the year with the need to take additional steps or allow a major cut in physician fees.

PENALIZING MYANMAR

The House voted to punish Myanmar's brutal regime by freezing the financial assets of political and military leaders there and banning the importation of rubies from that country into the United States.

The unanimous vote sent the bill back to the Senate, which voted last year to also bar timber from Myanmar.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman said the legislation would put financial pressure on a corrupt regime that failed to adequately help its citizens recover from a cyclone and infamously put down democracy demonstrations by Buddhist monks last year.

President Bush is eager to sign the bill, which would extend and harden sanctions Congress first passed in 2003. Bush's wife, Laura, has emerged as a strong proponent of democratization in the Southeast Asian country.

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