Tell Your Congressional Representatives to Support Medicare Payment Reform
[Posted 07/19/07]

CMA is once again leading the fight to protect access to care and develop real plans for Medicare reform. CMA needs your help to make it happen. Contact your Congressional representative and ask to protect access to care by:

• Reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). SCHIP has provided health insurance to hundreds of thousands of California's uninsured children for a decade. Urge your representatives to reauthorize this very important program at 250 percent of federal poverty level (the current California coverage level).
• Stopping the Medicare SGR Payment Cut. Urge Congress to protect access to physicians for California seniors by stopping the proposed 9.9 percent payment cut and instead instituting payment increases for two to three years or until a long-term alternative to the SGR payment system can be crafted.
• Updating the Medicare Geographic Payment Localities. A CMA-sponsored bill (HR 2482) making its way through Congress would fix the inequitable and outdated Medicare geographic payments. If your members of Congress are authors or sponsors of the bill, please thank them for supporting this long-overdue fix. If your representatives have not yet signed on, please urge them to do so immediately!

Funding Sources: The cost to continue SCHIP, stop the 10 percent Medicare physician pay cut, and institute a payment update for 2 years is at least $80 billion. Tell your members of Congress that these reforms should be paid for by increasing the tobacco tax and equalizing Medicare Advantage health plan rates with fee-for-service rates. Currently, Medicare Advantage plans receive on average 12 percent more than fee-for-service physicians for providing the same services to Medicare beneficiaries. Bringing plan rates in line with fee-for-service physician rates could save as much as $30 billion.

Call AMA's grassroots hotline at 800/833-6354, enter your zip code when prompted, and you will be automatically connected with your representative.

Click here for more details on this issue.

Contact: Susan Bassett, 916/444-5532 or sbassett@cmanet.org.