Support is growing to finally move Medicare into the 21st century by employing practical solutions to problems that have plagued the system for years, including repealing the flawed sustainable growth rate (SGR) that has been a failure since it was first enacted. The lame duck session in Congress is a perfect opportunity to end the broken cycle of temporary patches by repairing our Medicare system and make significant improvements for future generations.
Momentum is building with a growing number of bipartisan members of congress in both the House and the Senate, including the congressional “doc” caucus, declaring their support for immediate action on SGR reform. The bipartisan, bicameral bill developed last spring is the remedy to fix the defective policy.
If Congress does not seize the moment to act now during the lame duck session all of the hard bipartisan, bicameral work that went into building that framework will be for naught, and the process of negotiating a solution will start all over again. The current legislation is a remedy to improve care for patients through new health care delivery and payment systems that promise to create the stable environment that is needed for physicians to innovate.
Eliminating SGR would also free physicians to make the investments needed to implement new models of health care delivery and payment systems that are already proving successful in reducing costs and increasing access to high-quality care in pilot programs across the country.
Patient-centered medical homes that enable physicians to better manage chronic diseases and coordinate patient care, and shared savings arrangements that incentivize physicians to redesign care delivery to reduce total spending are just two examples of new approaches that are quickly creating a blueprint for the future of a reformed Medicare system.
Yet year after year the SGR has created an unpredictable environment that makes those innovative changes impossible by calling for unmanageable annual rate cuts for physician services and forcing increasingly expensive legislative patches to preserve access to care for millions of Medicare patients. Congress has agreed and continues to agree that the SGR is a defective policy. To date, Congress has spent a staggering $169 billion on 17 short term patches to shore up the ailing system it created, all while the gap between what Medicare pays and the actual cost of caring for patients has grown ever wider.
As a country, we simply cannot afford to continue to perpetuate a system that is not meeting the needs of the American public. Fixing the system now will cost less than what has already been spent on the 17 previous patches that did not fix the real problem. Patients and their physicians should not continue to be collateral damage caused by a failure to correct a flawed policy initiated by Congress.
America is relying on its elected leaders to secure high-quality, cost-effective health care for Medicare patients now and in the future. Medicare can have brighter future if Congress will finally focus on doing what’s right for patients.
It’s a no-brainer. The American Medical Association urges policymakers to finish this by continuing to pursue good faith, bipartisan efforts to end the SGR once and for all.
