My GOP colleagues are doing more harm than good. Later today, the House is going to vote on a Medicare deal to address the ways doctors are paid. Now that we're in the final hours of a rushed legislative session before Congress leaves for recess, the House will try to force the Senate—which is currently debating the FY2016 Budget—to pass the deal without input or time for careful consideration.

Medicare's physician payment formula—the "sustainable growth rate" (SGR) in Washington speak—is another central-planning failure that puts bureaucrats and lobbyists ahead of patients and doctors. There is broad, bipartisan consensus that reform is desperately needed. However, the only thing worse than the SGR's annual circus is repealing the SGR without solving the much bigger problems in Medicare. Unfortunately, the deal finalized in the House this week largely ignores those overarching problems and threatens to leave the next generation further in debt.

The SGR is a clear reminder that centrally planned health care does not work. Because Washington specializes in avoiding tough decisions, seniors and doctors endure annual last minute legislative whiplash as politicians argue about how to avoid growing cuts to Medicare payments. It's another consequence of a modern entitlement built on an antiquated, Great Society structure.

Although SGR is a painful way to restrain spending, it has forced politicians to find offsets for temporary "patches." Since 2003, 17 patches have been passed involving tough choices and real fiscal savings, primarily from Medicare. Nevertheless, this annual political theater isn't the optimal way to make public policy and it should to be replaced with constructive reforms.

We already have a model: The budget the House passed Wednesday includes real solutions to secure Medicare for seniors and their grandchildren. Nearly 16 million seniors have already chosen to receive their benefits through a private sector alternative to fee-for-service, Medicare Advantage. The House Budget builds on that success through the competitive reforms originally championed by Ways and Means Chairman Sen. Paul Ryan.

What a difference a day makes. Today, the House is planning to take up another bill about Medicare. Unfortunately, the House's SGR package misses an opportunity to solve Medicare's underlying problems. Rather than offering bold policy solutions, this bill relies primarily on command-and-control bureaucracy. It substitutes the flawed SGR formula for more than 120 pages of new rules to govern the practice of medicine. (While I support the goal of paying for quality and results, I have little faith in Medicare bureaucrats' actually achieving that objective.) Additionally, it props up Medicare's flawed fee-for-service structure with little attempt to give seniors more choices and higher quality care in a reformed program.

To make matters worse, the current proposal saddles taxpayers and their grandchildren with $141 billion over the first decade and continues to add to the deficit in the second decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). This even counts the real savings from Medigap reforms and charging wealthier seniors higher premiums. While these structural reforms are an important step, they represent only a small down payment, $35 billion over the first 10 years and as much as $230 billion over the second 10 years, on what the Medicare Trustees estimate to be more than $35 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the long term.

Additionally, this deal fails the budget common sense test. Some in Washington, based primarily on the logic in President Barack Obama's budgets, have convinced themselves that by using a magical "alternative fiscal baseline," Congress doesn't have to pay for new spending. That's like telling a Nebraska family that by finding a new accountant, they magically don't have to pay for a new house. Washington can debate the most appropriate baseline to use, but the fact is that simply repealing the SGR will result in bigger checks to health care providers, and therefore, higher government spending. To quote CBO, "those changes to how Medicare sets payments rates for physicians' services would increase direct spending, relative to the current-law baseline."

It's hard to believe politicians can't save another $14 billion a year (the annual amount needed to finish paying for the $141 billion 10-year cost) in a program that spends more than $625 billion every year. Even Obama's budget saves more than $400 billion over the next decade—and while I can't agree with all of his policies, I would note that's nearly double what would be required to offset the full SGR repeal. We shouldn't give up on finding fiscally responsible offsets for the SGR. Rather, we need continued leadership to make tough, but fiscally responsible choices.

Finally, the focus of the deal has been on the physician payment aspects, but I suspect few politicians have actually read the 263-page bill. In those pages are hidden policies that effectively create new Medicaid entitlements, enshrine Obamacare's payout to Community Health Centers and offer 21 provisions to health care special interests. There may be other provisions Congress hasn't taken the time to carefully evaluate and understand. Unfortunately, we know—thanks to Obamacare—what happens when Congress passes a bill to find out wh at's in it.

American deserve more than smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately, the House bill is a missed opportunity to fix Medicare and arguably makes our long-term problems worse. This is exactly why Congress has dismal approval ratings. ‎Let's use this opportunity to secure the program for seniors and for their grandchildren. Congress should scrap this deal and work on a new solution.

Ben Sasse is a U.S. senator from Nebraska.