AOA continues advocacy amid health care reform

The American Health Care Act has cleared the first in a series of major approvals, and the American Optometric Association announced that it is working diligently to ensure optometry’s priorities continue unabated in any new health care law.

The association has not taken a formal position on the American Health Care Act (AHCA) but is following the legislative maneuvering underway that may result in the legislation being significantly amended before it is reported to the full House and Senate, the AOA reported.

The AHCA passed portioned reviews by the House Energy & Commerce and Ways and Means committees on March 9. However, it has since met opposition from not only Democrats and health care groups, such as the American Medical Association, but also prominent Republicans, according to the AOA.

AOA President Andrea P. Thau, OD, has met with members of Congress on Capitol Hill to advance the profession’s priorities, even as the House committees began considering portions of the AHCA language.

“While we are still assessing the impact that the complete bill and potential committee-level amendments would have on our patients, we are pleased to see the bill includes key provisions recognizing that expanded access to eye health and vision care through in-person, comprehensive eye examinations helps ensure early diagnosis of a range of threats to a patient’s health, including diabetes, hypertension and stroke,” Thau said in a statement provided to Primary Care Optometry News/Healio.com.

The AOA is committed to ensuring that lawmakers understand optometry’s priority messages, including:

Safeguarding doctors’ of optometry full physician recognition and inclusion in physician-level programs;

Upholding existing laws that assure access to in-person, comprehensive eye examinations, including the health plan-based pediatric essential benefit and the ban on discrimination by ERISA and other plans against doctors of optometry on the basis of licensure;

Ensuring patients’ safety from unsafe telehealth schemes and services; and

Ceasing abusive, anti-doctor health and vision plan policies, as reflected by the provisions of the AOA and American Dental Association-backed, bipartisan Dental and Optometric Care Access Act.

A provision of the draft bill seeks to guide states in designing new programs aimed at expanding access to preventive and primary care, specifically including “vision care services (whether preventive or medically necessary),” which the AOA sees as an early indication that its message is resonating with Congress.

“We are monitoring and lobbying Congress on the AHCA, knowing that this issue is much bigger than us,” Clarke Newman, OD, AOA Federal Relations Committee chair, said in the AOA’s release. “Our goal is to advocate for the positions that are important for optometry and our patients, such as access, full recognition and inclusions of doctors of optometry and protecting nondiscrimination language. We’ll continue our plans going forward to stop the abusive policies of vision care plans and we’ll continue to move the DOC Access Act forward.”