ASCO, along with nearly 70 medical societies, is urging Congress to permanently stop a reckless cycle of scheduled cuts and short-term patches to Medicare by eliminating the broken Sustainable Growth Rate formula.

As the cost of repealing the SGR gets worse over time, the group suggests paying for a complete repeal by using projected defense spending that will not be needed as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down.

Today, the cost to repeal the SGR formal is $290 billion and growing rapidly.  A letter sent to Congress by the group states, “Temporary patches that continue to assume even deeper future cuts add to this challenge, regardless of their duration. For instance, an SGR patch of two years will cost $39 billion in 2012, increase the cost of repeal to $346 billion, and increase the size of the next scheduled cut to physician payments to 36%. Pushing off this problem continues this reckless pattern of spending billions of dollars only to make future cuts deeper and more expensive to solve.”

 The House-Senate conference committee is expected to address Medicare physician reimbursement as part of the payroll tax-cut package. The committee is scheduled to hold its first meeting on Jan. 31.