Bill expands Medicare preventive services

Prevention advocates welcome the measure, but say more is necessary.

By Gina Shaw, AMNews correspondent. July 2, 2001.

Washington -- Medicare coverage for preventive services would get a boost under legislation recently proposed in Congress.

The Medicare Wellness Act of 2001 would add several services -- from hypertension and cholesterol screening to smoking cessation counseling -- to the program's prevention package. The bill, introduced by Sens. Bob Graham (D, Fla.) and Jim Jeffords (I, Vt.), also would expand the qualifications for osteoporosis screening coverage and eliminate co-payments and deductibles for covered preventive services.

"These benefits focus on some of the most prominent underlying risk factors for illness that face all Medicare beneficiaries," Graham said. He added that the new benefits "represent the highest recommendations for Medicare beneficiaries" by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the Institute of Medicine. Reps. Sander Levin (D, Mich.) and Mark Foley (R, Fla.) introduced a companion bill in the House.

The Preventive Services Task Force, part of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, does not endorse specific legislation. But task force coordinator David Atkins, MD, MPH, said increasing Medicare's focus on prevention was important.

"It's an artifact of Medicare legislation that prevention is treated separately," Dr. Atkins said. "Currently, you can't add a preventive benefit to Medicare except by congressional legislation. In general, we support not treating prevention as if it were some poor stepchild of health care."

The heightened focus on prevention also sits well with the American College of Preventive Medicine, said the group's policy committee chair, Mark Johnson, MD, MPH, executive director of the Jefferson County Dept. of Health and Environment in Golden, Colo. The legislation "begins to put some more Medicare dollars into prevention, which tends to be a subject that everybody usually supports but very seldom funds." [...]