SAGES Advocacy & Health Policy (AHP) Committee is hard at work advocating on behalf of SAGES Membership. See below for recent policy updates.
Medicare Cuts-Important Call to Action to Congress
Physicians are facing a 2.8% cut in pay under the proposed 2025 Medicare physician payment schedule published earlier this month. The proposal from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reinforces the clear need for systemic changes and follows a 1.69% Medicare pay cut in 2024 and 2% drop in 2023. Please spread the word and reach out to Congress today.
Change Healthcare Cybersecurity Event
IT company Change Healthcare–part of Optum, a division of UnitedHealth group–facilitates a wide variety of healthcare transactions from physician billing to pharmacy benefits to clinical imaging. Last February, it sustained a cyberattack by the ransomware group BlackCat that resulted in one of the largest medial data breaches to date.
It’s estimated that more than 75% of physician practices and 90% of hospitals lost revenue. Numerous societies including SAGES, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Medical Association have worked to advocate on behalf of physicians and surgeons, and the federal government and UnitedHealth Group have responded to these efforts by offering programs to help repair the damage to the revenue cycle. Many of these assistance programs are now winding down, but the damage done to our practices and institutions may take years to recover from.
We must raise our collective voices to demand that UnitedHealth Group and their subsidiaries are held accountable for the damage they allowed to occur. If your practice was impacted by this data breach we encourage you to share your experience with our committee, the ACS, the AMA, and your representatives in Congress. For the latest information, go here.
FTC’s Ban on Restrictive Covenants for Healthcare Providers
In January 023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to ban non-compete clauses for U.S. workers, including healthcare providers. The AMA reports that 37-45% of U.S. physicians are bound by non-compete agreements. With this new rule, employers will no longer be able to incorporate non-compete agreements in healthcare providers’ contracts. After September 24, 2024, all previous non-competes will be non-enforceable. For more information, please go here.
Coming Soon: Private Equity Flipping a Hospital Near You
Over the last decade, private equity firms have been making increasing investments in hospitals and healthcare institutions. While some institutions benefit from the financial investment, most hospitals experience aggressive cost-cutting measures and increased debt as a result. The focus on profitability leads to reduced staffing levels, closures of essential services, and deterioration in the quality of care provided. This effect further worsens disparities especially for safety net hospitals and underserved communities, further limiting access. To read more about this trend, please go here.
What You Can Do
Frequently people say, “what has SAGES done for me on this,” or “what has the ACS done for me on this.” These organizations are member-driven organizations, if the members of those organizations do not participate in these efforts, then nothing gets done. Individually we have some impact, collectively that impact is far more powerful.
But it requires all of us who are eligible to participate, something we have not done in the past. When you face a problem during an operation you don’t walk away from the operating table; you lean in and fix the problem. The same approach is needed here.
It does not take much effort if we all do this together. Below is a link to the ACS SurgeonsVoice website, where you can send messages to your members of Congress with relative ease. It actually will take longer to construct an email response to this message to say why you cannot send this than it will to click the link and send the emails to Congress. There is also a link to the AMA website, sending a similar message.
You can contact your members of Congress multiple times with this message, and the more we bring this to their attention, the better chance we have of making them aware and wanting to act on this issue.
WE CONTINUE TO NEED YOUR HELP. The reason other professions are so successful in this area (lawyers, etc.) is because they understand and recognize the need for advocacy from all their membership. Please do your part to advocate for our profession.
Click these links to send messages to your members of Congress about the upcoming Medicare payment cuts:
https://www.facs.org/advocacy/surgeonsvoice/
https://physiciansgrassrootsnetwork.org/be-heard?vvsrc=%2fCampaigns%2f96014%2fRespond
Reference Websites:
https://www.facs.org/advocacy/surgeonsvoice/
https://www.facs.org/advocacy/federal-legislation/preventing-cuts-to-payment-for-surgical-services/
https://www.facs.org/advocacy/regulatory-issues/payment-rules/medicare-physician-fee-schedule-rule/
https://www.facs.org/advocacy/federal-legislation/medicare-physician-payment/asks/
https://www.surgicalcare.org/2022/10/04/congress-letter-hr-8800/
https://www.surgicalcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SCC_FactSheets_ABCs.pdf
https://www.surgicalcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SCC_FactSheets_Pressures.pdf
https://www.surgicalcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SCC_FactSheets_Medicare_101_Surgeons.pdf