The Alliance of Specialty Medicine has officially responded to the Senate Finance Committee′s April 2009 options paper, “Tranforming the Health Care Delivery System: Proposals to Improve Patient Care and Reduce Health Care Costs.”
The Alliance urges Congress to:
1) Fix the SGR and broken Medicare physician payment system before expanding Medicare and public funded healthcare.
2) Not increase primary care payments in a budget neutral manner that would harm specialists.
3)Make adjustments to the PQRI before expanding it.
4) Adjust the ARRA HIT timelines.
5) Continue the current comparative effectiveness focus on transparency, public input and patient safeguards; and public-private funding partnership.
6) Not discriminate against physician-owned hospitals.
7) adopt a physician sunshine law that does not impact physician CME and have a negative impact on the advancement and adoption of medical technology.
8) develop an overall physician workforce strategy.
9) Further test ACOs.
10) Carefully consider unintended consequences in the development of efficiency measures and releasing physician data to the public.
11) Extend the time for imaging appropriateness criteria.
