AMA meeting: AMA backs Medicare pay reform plan

Delegates also approved several restructuring policies that go beyond the physician reimbursement issue.

By David Glendinning, AMNews staff. July 16, 2007.

Chicago -- The AMA House of Delegates threw its support behind organized medicine's plan to push for at least two years of positive Medicare updates while it continues to work on more permanent reforms.

Delegates at the Annual Meeting backed a report from the AMA Board of Trustees that lays out the strategy, unveiled earlier this year by the AMA and 76 other medical organizations. Under the plan, Congress would eliminate the physician pay cuts expected in 2008 and 2009 but also would establish a "date certain" by which to overhaul the entire payment system.

Support from the house for this approach will allow the Association to maintain its focus while it and the other organizations navigate through a couple of politically tricky years, said AMA Trustee J. James Rohack, MD. "This reflects the reality that in our current legislative cycle, the Congress isn't ready yet to bite the apple," he said. "We feel that in asking for the two years, this gets us through the 2008 presidential elections."

The desired result is a permanent pay system that bases annual changes in physician rates on the Medicare Economic Index, a measure of the increases in doctors' costs of providing care. The two years of immediate relief also would be based on the MEI.

Some delegates warned, however, that simply moving from the sustainable growth rate formula to one based on the MEI would be a good first step but not the solution to all of physicians' Medicare payment problems.