The AMA is opposing legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives that would inappropriately allow pharmacists to furnish services that would otherwise be covered if they had been provided by a physician, despite pharmacists not having the same extensive education and training as physicians.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
A majority of U.S. states are considering legislation to rightsize the time-wasting, care-delaying payer practice of prior authorization. In all, nearly 90 prior-authorization reform bills have been considered this legislative session in 30 states, and more than a dozen are still on the table for potential passage.
My latest for the AMA. Read the whole shebang.
A bill has been introduced in Congress to tie the Medicare physician payment schedule to the Medicare Economic Index, a move that is essential to protecting access to high-quality care for the 65 million older adult Americans covered by Medicare.
By instituting an annual inflation-based update, the legislation would put physicians on equal footing with virtually all other health professionals and organizations paid by Medicare. Physician payment rates have been subject to a six-year payment freeze that will last until 2026 and are seeing 2% across-the-board Medicare pay cuts that started in January.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
While health insurers claim prior-authorization requirements are used for cost and quality control, a vast majority of physicians say authorization protocols lead to unnecessary waste and avoidable patient harm.
One-third of the 1,001 physicians surveyed by the AMA in December reported that prior authorization has led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care.
More specifically, the AMA survey found that these shares of the physician respondents reported that prior authorization led to:
- A patient’s hospitalization—25%.
- A life-threatening event or one that required intervention to prevent permanent impairment or damage—19%.
- A patient’s disability or permanent bodily damage, congenital anomaly or birth defect, or death—9%.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
For the first time since the pandemic’s onset, hundreds of physicians, medical society staffers and others met in person in a bitterly divided Washington, D.C., for the AMA National Advocacy Conference.
This year’s legislative and regulatory priorities are crystal clear, driven by the urgent need to protect patients’ access to high-quality care and help physicians who have put so much on the line during the COVID-19 pandemic.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
The AMA and nearly 120 physician organizations are strongly supporting proposed reforms of prior authorization in Medicare Advantage and the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
The physician organizations sent a letter to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure thanking her and urging the agency to finalize proposed reforms that target the inappropriate use of prior-authorization requirements by Medicare Advantage plans to delay, deny and disrupt the provision of medically necessary care to patients.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
Physicians and medical students’ time is more squeezed than ever by the demands of practicing and studying amid the tripledemic and soaring rates of professional burnout. It’s no surprise that a growing number of physicians and future doctors are taking advantage of listening to podcasts to enhance their knowledge of trends in medicine while commuting, running errands, making dinner or doing housework.
In 2022, more than 600,000 episodes of AMA podcasts were downloaded as listeners learned from doctors and other experts who give voice to an array of original AMA podcasts.
My latest for the AMA, which highlights 10 of our most popular episodes in 2022. Read the whole shebang.
In enacting the 4,000-plus page, end-of-the-year spending package, Washington politicians failed to stop the entirety of scheduled Medicare pay cuts, which will come at a financially precarious time for physician practices left reeling in the COVID-19 pandemic’s third year.
Because of that, physicians will face a 2% cut in Medicare payment in 2023, and 2024 will bring at least a 1.25% cut. Nevertheless, the $1.7 trillion bill signed by President Joe Biden does include a number of important AMA-supported provisions that physicians should know about.
My latest for the AMA. Read the whole shebang.
On prior authorization, telehealth, climate change, health equity and more—these health systems led the way during a trying year. Learn how.
My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.
U.S. physicians will face a 2% cut in Medicare payment in 2023, and 2024 will bring at least a 1.25% cut under the massive, must-pass omnibus spending deal struck by congressional leaders.
“The AMA is extremely disappointed and dismayed that Congress failed to prevent Medicare cuts next year, threatening the financial viability of physician practices and endangering access to care for Medicare beneficiaries,” said AMA President Jack Resneck Jr., MD. “This 2% cut, following two decades of flat payment rates, will have consequences on health care access for older Americans.”
Doctors had been staring down as much as 8.5% in 2023 Medicare pay cuts, but an advocacy campaign led by the AMA and joined by more than 150 organizations representing over 1 million physicians and other health care clinicians helped stave off many of the reductions.
My latest for the AMA. Read the whole shebang.
Nurse practitioners delivering emergency care without physician supervision or collaboration in the Veterans Health Administration increase lengths of stay by 11% and raise 30-day preventable hospitalizations by 20% compared with emergency physicians, says a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
That higher preventable hospitalization rate “may reflect two possibilities,” says the working paper, written by David Chan, MD, PhD, associate professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, and Yiqun Chen, PhD, assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
One is that “NPs have poorer decision-making over whom to admit to the hospital, resulting in underadmission of patients who should have been admitted and a net increase in return hospitalizations, despite NPs using longer lengths of stay to evaluate patients’ need for hospital admission.”
The other possibility is that “NPs produce lower quality of care conditional on admitting decisions, despite spending more resources on treating the patient (as measured by costs of the ED care). Both possibilities imply lower skill of NPs relative to physicians.”
My latest for the AMA. Read the whole shebang.
It was another eventful policymaking meeting for the AMA House of Delegates, which held its first in-person Interim Meeting since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the delegates met in Honolulu, I led our news team’s editorial coverage from that earthly paradise known as the Midwest.
This article, “ICYMI: 10 stories to read from the 2022 AMA Interim Meeting,” offers a relatively brief rundown of the meeting.
Our blog, “Highlights from the 2022 AMA Interim Meeting,” provides a more complete account of our news coverage and includes actions that didn’t result in full-blown news articles.
I also filed these two stories based on actions at the meeting:
The AMA has gathered first-of-its-kind data on pharmacy benefit managers and its analysis finds a widespread high degree of market concentration in local markets across the U.S. where PBMs provide services to commercial health insurers.
…
At the national level, the analysis found that a handful of PBMs have a large collective market share for the three PBM services most used by insurers:
- The 10 largest PBMs had a collective share of 97%.
- The four largest PBMs had a collective share of roughly 66%.
- Six PBMs are used exclusively by one insurer or a set of Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.
From my latest at the AMA. The whole shebang.
kboreilly.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.