From Politico:
W.H. ASSURES AMA: DOC FIX COMING THIS SPRING: Inside Health Policy’s Brett Coughlin reports: ‘A board member of the American Medical Association has twice been assured personally that the White House will continue to push for a repeal of the Medicare physician payment formula this spring after health reform passes, according to a source who was on an AMA conference call Friday.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this means that the newly passed health-care overhaul would increase deficits by $139 billion from 2015 to 2019 alone, and by far more in subsequent years. And that’s not even counting all of the other budgetary gimmicks in the bill, such as its rampant double-counting, as Rep. Paul Ryan highlights here.
The only reason that the White House could ever claim, however implausibly, that its health-care bill would not dramatically increase deficits was because the Democrats instructed the CBO to give the bill credit for “savings” from reducing doctors’ pay under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising it back up. Now it comes out that, even before the Senate bill was passed by the House, the Democrats were already telling one of the most prominent groups that they had coaxed into publicly supporting the legislation, the AMA, that they planned to repeal these “savings” — and to do so before the season turned from spring to summer.
There are words for people like this, and “cynical,” “disingenuous,” and “deceitful” are some of the nicer ones.