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Instead
of seven lean years starting next year, you could receive
guaranteed pay increases from Medicare, if one pending bill
becomes law.
Rep.
Nancy Johnson (R-CT), chair of the House Ways and Means
Health Subcommittee, is drafting a bill that would repeal
the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula which calls for
cuts of nearly five percent over the next seven years. It
also would require pay for performance (P4P) or "value-based
purchasing."
Rep.
Johnson's staff showed a draft of the bill to physician
organizations and other advocates last week, and a final
version may be released this week, says Piper Nieters, an
attorney with Powers Pyles Sutter & Verville in Washington
who saw the draft bill. The bill would set out positive
updates for physician payments for the next few years, and
then put in place a new formula for future updates based
on actual physician cost data.
Physicians
may welcome Johnson's version of P4P, which would give a
greater role to specialty societies, says Nieters. Instead
of appointing a central commission to come up with physician
quality measures, the Johnson bill would ask each physician
specialty group to submit recommendations for quality measures
to an independent agency such as the National Quality Forum
by March 1, 2006. The agency would then offer recommendations
to the HHS Secretary.
Some
physician groups did have a concern about this approach,
notes Nieters. They claimed that the NQF already has a backlog
in dealing with their quality recommendations. If the NQF
or some other agency was unable to process their recommended
quality measures quickly, then some physician specialties
could find their quality measures left out of the final
version, they worried.
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