Key Vote YES on Enforcing “Pay-as-you-go” in the “Doc Fix”

As one of our over 6.9 million FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your senators and ask them to vote YES on the Lee amendment to H.R. 2, the “Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act”. This amendment would simply strike the section of the bill that waives Congress’ “pay-as-you-go” requirement, forcing lawmakers to account for the cost of the bill without increasing the deficit.

Congress is under tremendous pressure to pass a bill to permanently implement a “doc fix” to prevent massive Medicare payment cuts to doctors. But they need to pay for this fix, and avoid the over $140 billion that it would add to the deficit over the next ten years.

Congress has mostly operated under some form of PAYGO requirement since 1990, but has seldom stuck with it. To see the ease with which Congress bypasses this tepid budget restraint, one must only look at the growth of the national debt, from just over $3 trillion in 1990 to over $18 trillion today.

But PAYGO remains a useful tool nonetheless, if Congress cares to enforce it, and this amendment by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) would do just that. If passed, the amendment would require Congress to find savings equal to the bill’s deficit spending by the end of the year. If Congress fails to find specific cuts by that time, spending would be automatically cut across the board.

H.R. 2 is a very flawed bill to begin with – the very least Congress can do is pay for it.

Thus, I hope that you’ll tell your senators to vote YES on the Lee amendment to force Congress to pay for its “doc fix”. We will count votes for this amendment towards their score in FreedomWorks’ Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2015. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.
Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe
President and Founder,
FreedomWorks