Monday, November 18, 2013
SGR REPEAL BILL: IS IT GOOD ENOUGH?
TMA Board of Trustees
Chair Carlos Cardenas, MD, led a group of Texas physician leaders, TMA Vice
President of Advocacy Darren Whitehurst, and me — plus senior staff and key
physicians from eight other state medical societies — in an intense, three-day
lobby visit to Capitol Hill. We met with congressional health care leaders like
Reps. Michael Burgess, MD (R-Lewisville), and Kevin Brady (R-The Woodlands) plus
Republican and Democrat staff of the key committees of jurisdiction. We also
enjoyed audiences with Reps. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), John Fleming, MD
(R-La.), and Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.). Dallas orthopedic surgeon John Gill, MD,
and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Dallas) also set up lawmaker-physician meetings that
included Drs. Carolyn Evans, Asa Lockhart, Russ Kridel, and Ray Callas. The
major topic of conversation was the joint proposal from the House Ways and Means Committee and
Senate Finance Committee to repeal the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR)
formula that has bedeviled physicians’ Medicare payments for more than a decade.
The draft plan does away with the SGR but imposes a 10-year freeze on
physicians’ Medicare payments and establishes several new pay-for-performance
programs. While several national specialty societies are supporting the bill as
is, TMA, the American Medical Association, and the Coalition of State Medical
Societies is pushing for substantial improvements and elimination of a host of
onerous federal health care regulations. An influential health care blog
published a commentary from the coalition that outlines our concerns. The
issue has generated a lot of debate at the AMA
House of Delegates meeting that convened just outside Washington on
Saturday. We suspect it will take at least several months for any final product
to make its way through Congress — if that happens at all. That means we’ll need
another short-term congressional patch to avoid the 24-percent cut scheduled to
take effect in January.
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