$11 billion reductions to Medicare payments to doctors, providers from automatic budget cuts

In the USA, Medicare providers would see reductions of about $11 billion beginning in January 2013 as part of series of automatic spending cuts set to begin next year unless Congress acts to halt them, according to estimates released Friday by the White House Office of Management and Budget reported by Kaiser Health News.

The numbers came in a report that details how federal agencies would implement roughly $110 billion in mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts agreed to by Congress and US President Barack Obama last August as a way to end a bitterly partisan dispute over raising the debt ceiling. Lawmakers in both chambers, as well as Pres Obama, want to avoid the automatic cuts that would trim federal spending by $2.1 trillion over the next 10 years, called sequestration.

Noting that "sequestration would have a devastating impact on important defense and non-defense programs," the administration detailed cuts to more than 1,200 federal government budget accounts. Half the cuts would come from military programs. Social security and Medicaid are exempted.

“Sequestration is bad policy”