Only days remain until Congress concludes its “lame duck” session. That’s not much time for lawmakers to address a long agenda—but support is building in the nation’s capital to eliminate Medicare’s sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula this year. Now is the time to turn up the heat on Congress: Contact your elected officials today, and tell them to adopt SGR repeal legislation now.
“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,” AMA President Robert M. Wah, MD, wrote in a recent AMA Viewpoints piece. “The bipartisan, bicameral bill developed last spring is the remedy to fix the defective policy.”
Earlier this year, Congress came close to passing the SGR Repeal and Medicare Provider Payment Modernization Act of 2014, H.R. 4015/S. 2000, but stopped short of adopting this landmark bill. Now lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are expressing new optimism that the legislation could pass in the lame duck session currently underway.
“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,” Dr. Wah said. “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.”
“Most of the hard work has been done,” Rep. Michael Burgess, MD, R-Texas, said earlier this month during a special session at the 2014 AMA Interim Meeting. “I’m optimistic that … there could be a new SGR ending in site.”
Act now: Send your members of Congress an urgent email, and call their offices via the AMA Physicians Grassroots Network at (800) 833-6354.
As Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, told physicians at the 2014 AMA Interim Meeting, “The clock is ticking.”
