How the Dems used children's health care to grab money

NY Times:

Despite promises by Congress to end the secrecy of earmarks and other pet projects, the House of Representatives has quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to specific hospitals and health care providers under a bill passed this month to help low-income children.

Instead of naming the hospitals, the bill describes them in cryptic terms, so that identifying a beneficiary is like solving a riddle. Most of the provisions were added to the bill at the request of Democratic lawmakers.

One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, sits on Green Bay, straddling the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, more than 200 miles north of Chicago. The bill would increase Medicare payments to the hospital by instructing federal officials to assume that it was in Chicago, where Medicare rates are set to cover substantially higher wages for hospital workers.

Lawmakers did not identify the hospital by name. For the purpose of Medicare, the bill said, “any hospital that is co-located in Marinette, Wis., and Menominee, Mich., is deemed to be located in Chicago.” Bay Area Medical Center is the only hospital fitting that description.

The primary purpose of the bill is to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program while enhancing benefits for older people in traditional Medicare. But a review of the bill by The New York Times found that it would also direct millions of dollars a year to about 40 favored hospitals, by increasing their Medicare payments.

The bill, for example, would give special treatment to two hospitals in Kingston, N.Y., stipulating that Medicare should pay them as if they were in New York City, 80 miles away. Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York, who worked to get this provision into the bill, said it would allow the hospitals to pay competitive wages so they could keep top health care professionals.

John E. Finch Jr., a vice president of Benedictine Hospital, one of the two in Kingston, said the bill would “make a significant difference to us financially,” increasing the payment for a typical Medicare case by $1,000.

Some Republicans have complained about what they call “hospital pork.” Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, said the bill was “littered with earmarks for hospital-specific projects.”

...

It is actually a much worse bill than described because it cut Medicare funding for everyone else. In other words, Democrats who got their earmarks in got increased Medicare funding at the expense of everyone else whose cuts in Medicare were supposed to pay for in increased children's health care. This bill has veto bait written all over it and it should be an embarrassment to Democrats if they were capable of that emotion. It is also a great bill for Republicans to campaign on next year to show how irresponsible and unfair Democrats are. Kudos to the Times for a good catch.