A claim that has been popping up in some news circles over the past day is that the doc fix -- which freezes Medicare payments to physicians, instead of allowing them to be cut by 27 percent starting in March -- has become more expensive in light of CBO's new budget and economic outlook.

For example, an article in the National Journal states:

Update: The American College of Physicians has also called for eliminating the SGR and the sequester and partially paying for them with war savings. To their credit, though, they propose a number of other scoreable savings options like having uniform cost-sharing for Parts A and B of Medicare, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, accelerating the health insurance excise tax or limiting the health exclusion, and enacting tort reform.

The New York Times had two interesting op-eds over the weekend on two essential components of deficit reduction: tax reform and health care costs.

First, former CEA chair Greg Mankiw lays out what he considers to be four consensus principles for tax reform. Essentially, these are the principles that he thinks should be followed in order to design an optimal tax code. The principles are:

Over the past couple of years, we've been arguing that raising the Social Security and Medicare ages could be an important part of a fiscal reform agenda.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the Zero Plan from the Fiscal Commission's tax reform effort.

Remember when we said last November that Congress had a lot to do by the end of the year? Well, they took care of FY 2012 appropriations, but everything else is now left to be determined or temporarily extended by the end of February (at least they have an extra day). The payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance, and doc fix extensions that passed will expire by February 29 and there could even be pressure to extend the AMT patch and the "tax extenders" that were neglected last month.

In response to the release of the Ryan-Wyden premium support plan last week, The New York Times spelled out options for reducing Medicare spending within the program's existing framework in an editorial yesterday. These options are some of the most commonly discussed out there in the budget debate, so it's useful to take a quick look at them.

This morning, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled their proposal to significantly change Medicare, one of the largest areas of the budget and one of the biggest drivers of our long-term debt. Rep. Ryan, who unveiled his own Medicare plan earlier this year, has joined with Sen. Wyden to craft a plan that would significantly improve the long-term fiscal imbalance. These lawmakers deserve credit for having the courage to propose specific reforms to help control rising debt levels.

With so many provisions set to expire at the end of the year, CRFB has released a new paper that details what lawmakers have to extend and how they can do it in a fiscally responsible way.

With the deadline for the Super Committee to come to an agreement nearly here, the Moment of Truth Project, a project of CRFB, has released two new policy papers diving deeper into the Fiscal Commission's recommendations on how to reform federal retirement programs and Medicare cost-sharing rules. These areas of the budget can be a critical element in forging a bipartisan deal that requires shared sacrifice from everyone.