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Physicians respond to Senate health care reform bill
Last Thursday in a rare Christmas Eve vote, members of the U.S. Senate voted 60 to 39 to pass their version of a health care reform bill. While the American Medical Association supported the passage of the bill, other physician groups took issue with the legislation.
In a press release, the American Medical Association (AMA) President J. James Rohack, MD, called the vote historic.
“The AMA supported passage of the bill because it contains a number of key improvements for our health care system, which currently is not working for far too many patients or the physicians who dedicate their lives to patient care,” Rohack stated in an AMA release. He noted that the legislation will improve choice and access to care, increase coverage for preventative care and ensure further development of comparative effectiveness research.
However, he stated that more work needs to be done as members of the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives merge their bills. He highlighted that issues regarding the payment advisory board, and cost control and quality improvement initiatives should be resolved during the House and Senate conference committee process. He also noted that separate action should be taken early next year to repeal the Medicare physician payment formula.
Other physician groups, such as The North American Spine Society (NASS), pointed to the lack of a payment fix as one of their qualms with the bill.
“NASS believes that this legislation places the physician-patient relationship in jeopardy, threatens access to specialty care and limits patient choice,” the group stated in a press release. “Furthermore, H.R. 3590 does not include a long-term fix to Medicare’s Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula or enact meaningful medical liability reforms. The measure would also place important health policy decisions into the hands of an unaccountable bureaucratic agency that lacks clinical expertise and congressional oversight.”
In addition, the Florida Medical Association (FMA) expressed deep disappointment regarding the passage of the bill.
“Florida’s physicians support a health care reform package that returns the focus to patients, yet the bill that senators passed today will only hamper physicians’ abilities to care for their patients,” James B. Dolan, MD, the FMA president, noted in a press release. “The bill fails to fix the Medicare physician payment system, ultimately hurting seniors in Florida and other states; it will exacerbate Medicaid patients’ current lack of access to care; and it will strip away the existing private coverage of millions of Americans. U.S. Senators rushed to reform today, and as a result they voted to support a bad bill.”
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