Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) has introduced legislation, H.R. 2053, that would restore full payment to anesthesiology teaching programs. Please ask your Representative to co-sponsor this important legislation. The bill mirrors H.R. 5246/H.R. 5348, the Medicare anesthesiology teaching payment reform legislation from the 109th Congress.
This misguided policy, in place since 1994, costs programs hundreds of thousands of dollars every year—hindering efforts to recruit and retain high-caliber teaching anesthesiologists, and ultimately weakening programs.
H.R. 2053 would reinstate full payment to ensure the viability of anesthesiology teaching programs throughout the country.
We need your help to pass this legislation. Please take action now: click HERE to contact your Representative through the ASA Legislative Action Center, or call the Capitol Switchboard, (202) 225-3121.
For more information, please use the following links:
H.R. 2053–
http://www.rmgh.net/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,114/Itemid,26/
Please note: Also pending before Congress is H.R. 1932 (introduced by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI)), the so-called “Medicare Academic Anesthesiology and CRNA Payment Improvement Act of 2007.” This measure was recently introduced by Rep. Stupak at the request of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists.
The author and supporters of H.R. 1932 claim it helps both anesthesiology residency programs and nurse education programs. However, the bill was secretly conceptualized and crafted without any involvement or consultation with ASA or any other individual or group associated with anesthesiology. And while the bill does indeed include provisions addressing payments to teaching anesthesiologists, it also includes costly extraneous provisions creating new, untested payment policies for nurse anesthesia programs – the cost of which could halt ASA progress to fix the teaching anesthesiologist 50% payment penalty. ASA believes the inclusion of these extraneous provisions is inappropriate and not consistent with longstanding Medicare regulatory structures supporting separate and distinct physician and nursing education programs.
On multiple occasions, representatives of ASA offered to work constructively with Rep. Stupak and representatives of the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists to address recently identified issues with nursing education-related payments so long as those issues were addressed independent of ASA’s longstanding efforts to fix payment problems facing teaching anesthesiologists. Those offers were declined.
