Then there is the Medicare Fraction Prevention and Osteoporosis Testing Act which addresses dual-energy Xray absorptiometry (DXA) scans, among other things. “Our members who performed bone density measurements in their offices were being forced out of that part of their business by the Draconian decreases in reimbursement for that very important test,” says Dr. Flood. Reimbursement was set to plummet year by year from $140 in 2006—about $5 more than the cost of providing the service—to $53 in 2010. The DXA bill would reinstate the 2006 reimbursement rate.
“Our members’ and our patients’ welfare was at stake, and congressional leaders held our fate in their hands,” says Dr. Flood. “We needed to make sure they would hear us. At the same time, all of medicine was threatened by the intrinsic flaw in the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, a formula for Medicare reimbursement which Congress passed into law in 1997, which each year leaves practices both private and academic scrambling to project budget shortfalls for the next year if a Congressional band-aid were not bestowed upon us.”
With such issues pressing, in 2005, the ACR had hired a Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm, Patton Boggs, LLP, to help broadcast the ACR’s message. Martha Kendrick, the ACR’s point person with Patton Boggs, pointed out that the ACR needed a way to reach members of Congress who had jurisdiction over the relevant legislation, says Dr. Flood. One good way to do that, she suggested, is through a PAC.
Additionally, says Neal S. Birnbaum, MD, who was president of the ACR at the time RheumPAC was established, “we had a presentation from the American College of Physician’s PAC, and after that deliberation, we decided to go ahead.” In the end, says Dr. Flood, most of the board members supported establishing the PAC. Those who disagree, he says, “help us maintain strict, ethical standards.”
RHEUMPAC COMMITTEE
Gary Bryant, MD, Chair, Minneapolis, Minn.
Melvin Britton, MD, Vice Chair, Atherton, Calif.
Fred Dietz, MD, Treasurer, Rockford, Ill.
James Engelbrecht, MD, Rapid City, S.D.
Lisa Imundo, MD, New York
Timothy Laing, MD, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Maura Iversen, PT, DPT, SD, MPH, Boston (ARHP Representative)
Edward Herzig, MD (GAC Liaison)
Paul Romain, MD, Cambridge, Mass. (ACR BOD Liaison)
Staff Contact: Aiken Hackett, [email protected]
RheumPAC: Helping Docs and Patients
Exactly what the RheumPAC has accomplished is hard to quantify, partly because it is one small player, many of whose goals coincide with those of larger medical associations, and partly because a PAC’s success can’t be measured in the manner of a randomized, controlled clinical trial. Nonetheless, the ACR is clearly gaining influence through the RheumPAC.
