 | | Dr. Howard Graman |
Each year in June, the American Medical Group Association (AMGA) holds a one day event in which member organizations are invited to send their representatives to Washington, D.C. so that we may educate our congressmen and senators about issues important to multispecialty medical groups. I attended this year for the third time representing PeaceHealth, and I had the opportunity to meet with Washington Senators Murray and Cantwell, as well as the senior staffers for Senator Wyden of Oregon.
We focused on two items: the SGR (Sustainable Growth Rate) payment policy for paying physicians caring for Medicare patients and the future of Medicare Advantage.
As many of you are aware, the SGR has been a failed policy for years and has required a temporary patch each year to avoid a severe reduction in payment to physicians. We advocated for the termination of the SGR approach and replacement with a new plan that promotes the rewarding of value rather than volume. We asked congressional leaders to consult medical groups when determining the clinical outcome targets to be used for payment and supported the use of a prospective attribution model for determining who is in a PCP's panel (rather than the current method used in ACO's of determining who was in a physician's panel after the fact).
We also recommended maintaining or enhancing appropriations for Medicare Advantage (MA) rather than reducing its funding as has been done the past couple of years. MA supports the pay for value risk based approach to financing health care as opposed to the traditional fee for service volume based care. MA has been very popular amongst payers, patients and providers and reducing funding puts the program in jeopardy and could potentially reduce access to care for Medicare enrollees.
PeaceHealth has an active public policy profile for hospital issues, as well. We believe that as a responsible member of the health care delivery system in this country, we should have a voice in its future.
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