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AMA sinks $2M into Medicare ad campaign |
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By Jeffrey Young
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Posted: 06/26/07 06:44 PM [ET] |
The American Medical Association (AMA) is spending $2 million on television ads this month in a campaign to get Congress to reject a looming cut in its Medicare payments.
The TV spots will run through the July 4th recess in Washington and in areas with large concentrations of older Americans. The AMA would not specify which markets outside of D.C. it is targeting, but the group is willing to extend the campaign to additional regions if Congress does not move toward stopping a 10 percent cut, set to take effect in 2008.
The launch of the ad effort coincides with the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago, which began Saturday and ends tomorrow.
The television spot repeats the AMA’s time-tested message that reductions in Medicare payments will result in diminished access for patients to physician services.
“Unless Congress takes action, Medicare services will be cut by over $40 billion, forcing doctors to limit their services, even stopping them from accepting new Medicare patients,” the ad says.
According to AMA surveys, doctors commonly report that lower payments would indeed have that effect on their practices. But government studies have not demonstrated growing problems with access.
More important, the budgetary constraints and the high price tag of an overhaul of the physician payment system has led Congress to put off enacting a permanent solution to the AMA’s perennial problem.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), freezing the fees at this year’s level would cost $21.7 billion over five years, while raising them by one percent would cost $23.9 billion.
This year, the budgetary issue might be more acute than before, as key Democratic lawmakers seek ways to pay for other priorities, such as an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The physicians’ lobby has long campaigned Congress to prevent annual reductions in the fees that doctors receive from Medicare. Since 2002, the statutory formula that establishes Medicare payment rates to doctors, which most lawmakers regard as flawed, has called for lower rates.
Congress has responded by enacting one- or two-year fixes, but it has continually postponed tackling the two major long-term problems: calculating the accuracy of Medicare payments to physicians and taming the rising expense of medical care to seniors and taxpayers.
Last year, lawmakers blocked a 4.4 percent cut and replaced it with a freeze. But they offset the higher spending by simply postponing the reductions to future years, which had the effect of setting up an even larger cut in 2008 and years beyond.
Next year, without new legislation, payments will shrink by 10 percent and will continue to shrink by 5 percent every year after that.
The AMA advocates that the current payment formula be scrapped and replaced with one that factors in an annual increase based on rising medical expenses. Creating a formula based on the Medicare Economic Index would cost $65 billion over five years and $262.1 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
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