Fallback Cuts or Super-Committee Concoction — Choosing Health Care's Policy Poison

Abstract

When the compromise on extending the debt limit was struck and enacted into Public Law 112-25 in early August, both President Barack Obama and the Republican congressional leadership stated that the law's painful fallback budget cuts would probably not be triggered. They asserted that their very existence would motivate lawmakers (through the newly established congressional joint committee, better known as the super committee) to compromise on a thoughtful, policy-oriented deficit- and debt-reducing alternative to meet the law's required second round of cuts. The theory was that the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts to popular programs such as the military and . . .