Last month I attended the American College of Physician’s Leadership Day at the Capitol. The American College of Physicians is a national organization of internists--physicians who specialize in the prevention, detection and treatment of illnesses in adults. ACP is the largest medical-specialty organization and second-largest physician group in the United States after the AMA.
ACP Leadership Day brings together primary care physician advocates from all over the country to discuss national health policy and to lobby for key health regulation. I went as a representative of the Georgia Chapter along with six other physicians from our state, including our Chapter Governor, Jacqueline Fincher, MD, MACP, a medical resident and a medical student from Emory University School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Georgia Chapter, Mary Daniel. The event included a learning session in which we reviewed the ACP’s priorities. We heard from ACP president Virginia Hood and Bob Doherty, SVP, Governmental Affairs & Public Policy for ACP. Dr. Doherty also summarizes the day in his blog ACP Advocate. Nancy Nielsen, MACP, Senior Advisor, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation spoke, appealing to physicians to provide feedback to the Center on the recently proposed rule for Accountable Care Organizations, which has been criticized for its complexity and for being out of reach for smaller medical practices. We also heard from a bipartisan congressional panel that discussed the ACP priority issues in the context of current legislative considerations. As one might imagine, much of this year’s discussion focused on the national budget crisis and lack of available funds for key Accountable Care Act programs. Later in the evening, after a keynote address by Alex Castellanos, Political Strategist and Analyst at CNN, Max Baucus was awarded the Joseph F. Boyle Award for Distinguished Public Service.
The ACP supports the following legislative action:
- Fix the Sustainable Growth Rate: The "SGR" is the formula used to determine physician payment by Medicare. The formula is linked to the GDP. However, with advances in technology and the aging population, health expense has outpaced inflation leading to a series of short term fixes to avoid drastic cuts in physician payment. The "fixes" continuously threaten to expire. The next expiration date is January 1st, 2012 when physician payment will be cut by 29.5% unless action is taken. As reported recently in Modern Medicine:
"Wiping out Medicare’s accumulated debt would cost almost $300 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and maintaining it with 0% updates until the end of the decade would cost more than $275 billion. With the current focus on reducing the deficit, neither of those options looks appealing."
- Fund programs that support expansion of the primary care workforce: the National Health Service Corps, Section 747 Training in Primary Care Medicine and the National Health Care Workforce Commission.
- Strengthen access to primary care, improve quality and lower cost by funding:
- The Medicare Primary Care Incentive Program, which preserves primary care incentive payment through 2015, while enacting further reforms to strengthen primary care (Medical Homes and Accountable Care Organizations).
- The Medicaid Comparability Program (ties Medicaid payment rates to Medicare rates--currently they are significantly lower).
- The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. The new Center needs adequate resources to accelerate broad pilot testing of new health care delivery models to improve access, quality and value)
- The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which researches the clinical effectiveness of different treatments to better inform patients and physicians in decision-making.
- Improve Health Reform by supporting:
- Empowering States to Innovate (allows states to opt out of ACA requirements three years early if they enact a program with equivalent coverage, i.e. Vermont).
- Patient’s Freedom to Choose Act, which repeals a provision of the ACA that requires that physicians provide written authorization for over the counter drugs reimbursed by a flexible spending account or a health savings account.
- State pilots to test health courts (would have medical liability cases heard by expert judges rather than lay juries).
On Thursday the Georgia Chapter broke out into small groups to speak with our legislators about these priorities. Among others, our chapter met personally with Senator Saxby Chambliss and Representative Tom Price. I was struck by various things I learned while at Leadership Day. As I spoke with a local physician who is employed by the Piedmont Physician’s Group in Atlanta I learned that this large multispecialty group is no longer accepting new Medicare patients who are enrolled in Medicare Advantage programs, and that many Piedmont physicians are also closed to new traditional Medicare patients. This speaks to the significant access issue that patients of the future will have unless Medicare is able to successfully reform, while still guaranteeing stable reimbursement for physicians.
In Washington there was significant discussion about Medicare innovation and the proposed new models of care delivery—Medical Homes and Accountable Care Organizations. Whether or not participation in such models will be feasible for small independent physician practices remains to be seen—and many are fearful. At present most physicians cannot get health insurance funding for being “Medical Home” certified. Locally, in Atlanta, several hospital-based groups are experimenting with Medical Home Pilots: Wellstar participates in a Medical Home pilot with Humana, Piedmont Physicians Group participates in a Medical Home pilot with Cigna, and Emory will soon launch a Medical Home pilot with Aetna. However, none of these pilots involve more than a single payer.
While I sensed bipartisan support for fixing the SGR, there was significantly less agreement about how to best reduce Medicare cost while improving quality of care and access.
CMS’ Administrator Don Berwick recently stated in the Health Affairs blog that health care transformation
"won’t yield to a massive top-down national project...Successful redesign of health care is a community by community task. That’s technically correct and it’s also morally correct, because in the end each local community – and only each local community – actually has the knowledge and the skills to define what is locally right"
This being said, Dr. Berwick will need to work to succeed in convincing many that implementing these ACA programs can make a positive difference on a community level in improving health care. To help reach consensus from both sides of the aisle, ACP Leadership Day was a good opportunity for practicing internists from around the country to tell their local stories, illustrating how federal policy impacts day to day practice on a micro-level. I hope that some of our messages were heard.
