Dems question credibility of memo

The memo hit the inbox about noon Friday, looking for all the world like Democratic talking points for health reform.

Sensitive internal documents find their way into reporters’ inboxes all the time. Sometimes they get published. Sometimes they don’t. The ones that do are the ones that look, sound and feel credible to the reporters covering the story. This one does, with its talk of a full SGR repeal, the JCT estimate and a streamlining of the insurance exchanges.


So it got posted. A short item, with a link to the memo, appeared on POLITICO’s Live Pulse blog, which is dedicated to continually updating the latest events in the health care reform debate.

Democrats cried foul, claiming the memo was fabricated and saying they could find no one on the Democratic leadership or committee staffs who had authored the memo or read it.

“Can you take down the memo ASAP? It’s a fake – did not come from Democrats,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s spokeswoman Stephanie Lundberg emailed.

POLITICO circled back to the multiple Republican sources that had sent along the memo and asked if they could authenticate its Democratic origins. They could not, so POLITICO pulled the item from the website.

Later, Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner lit into Republicans for talking about the memo. “A real piece of legislation that for a year we’ve been working on and a fake document that they won’t even give a source for,” Weiner said on the House floor.

There would seem to be two possibilities. One is an outright hoax, with some dirty trickster hunched over a keyboard to fashion a memo so realistic-sounding in substance and tone that even seasoned health reporters could get fooled.

The other is a more complicated explanation – perhaps a draft that somehow got into circulation, even before it was widely seen within the party staff and committees, but nonetheless represents the point of view of the Democrats heading into a critical weekend vote.

The memo’s most explosive statement is that Democrats planned a so-called “doc fix” to Medicare reimbursement rates later this year, but don’t want to talk about it ahead of Sunday’s vote because it’s going to cost billions.

So if the memo’s a fake, does that mean there’s no “doc fix” in the works?

No, Democrats are planning to adjust Medicare reimbursement rates, just not until later this year. In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said as much in a news conference Friday.

And Democrats haven’t exactly been trumpeting that fact ahead of the vote, because Republicans have pounced on it as evidence the Democrats’ health reform efforts aren’t really deficit-neutral, but would in fact expand the federal budget.

Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami declined to discuss the substance of the memo, specifically whether the White House and congressional Democrats are working with doctors’ groups to introduce a “doc fix” after reform is finished. Elshami referred a reporter to a statement he and Lundberg released jointly:

“Opponents of health reform can’t win on the merits of their arguments so they must stoop to acts of desperation to deny Americans an honest and truthful debate. The latest examples of this came today with the maligning of Democratic members on the House floor, and the circulation of an apparently fraudulent memo that was falsely attributed to Democratic staffers,” they said.

Democrats left the so-called doc fix out of the reform legislation last year because its $200 billion price tag would have made it impossible for Democrats to claim that their bill reduces the deficit. The Medicare fix would more than erase the bill’s projected $138 billion in deficit reduction in the first decade.

House Republicans even used the opportunity to hold a press conference criticizing Democrats for claiming that their health care bill will reduce the deficit while planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a doc fix later this year.

In the end, POLITICO followed an old rule-of-thumb in journalism in taking down the memo: when in doubt, leave it out. By day’s end, it was still impossible to tell exactly what’s the real story behind the memo. But in the next few months, when Democrats try to pass a multi-billion-dollar “doc fix,” maybe that will shed a little light on the Democrats’ real intentions.

Craig Gordon is POLITICO’s White House Editor.