The Ryan-Murray budget deal hasn’t passed Congress yet, but special interests are already preparing to repeal the modest cuts in the deal. As Breitbart News has reported, half of the spending cuts in the deal, and all of the deficit reduction, occurs 9 and 10 years from now, with cuts to Medicare providers. The lobbying group for hospitals has vowed to reverse these cuts.
The hospital group acknowledges that can’t block the budget deal. “My working assumption is this is going to pass; the powers that be have deemed it so,” said Chip Kahn, President and CEO of Federation of American Hospitals. “There are some trains you can stand in front of but you have to make sure you can jump out of the way because the train is not going to stop.”
The hospitals’ promise to undo the modest, and very distant, cuts in the Ryan-Murray budget go a long way to understand why it is so difficult to secure meaningful cuts. Virtually every line item in the budget has a constituency ready to defend their spending.
These future cuts were already mythical. It is unlikely a future Congress or President would feel obligated to follow a decade-old budget deal. The cuts, though, will probably be undone long before then.
David Moore, senior director of government affairs at the Association of American Medical Colleges summed it up to The Hill. “They are going to at least address sequestration six or seven times before we get to 2021. This going to be an ongoing discussion and we are going to engage with lawmakers.”
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