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Special Session Update
House and Senate members spent the first day of the session working to resolve these three major issues:
- To pass a safety-net measure that allows the Transportation and Insurance departments and a few others to keep operating. Those agencies are scheduled to close by Sept. 1, 2010, if they don't get the legal authority to continue.
- To pass legislation authorizing $2 billion in road-building bonds already approved by voters.
- To extend transportation officials' authority to enter public-private contracts to build and operate some roads and toll roads.
At this point, medicine’s only issue is the continuation of the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) through the interim with its full sunset review delayed until 2011. Governor Perry has added no other items to the special session call.
Drugs Removed from Medicare’s Physician Payment Formula
Positive news: Yesterday, the Obama administration proposed to remove physician-administered drugs from the Medicare physician payment formula in future years. Organized medicine has been working to get these drugs removed from the flawed physician payment formula since 2002. Although this does not solve the Sustainable Growth Ratio (SGR) situation, it will likely reduce the size of future physician payment cuts.
Despite this change, without Congressional action, physicians are still facing an average of 21.5-percent cut to their Medicare payments in January 2010.
There are also other changes included in the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed rules for 2010 including large modifications to the relative value units (RVUs) for some specialties. One positive element is an increase in primary care physician payments. However, many specialties may face significant reductions. The document (PDF) is 1,128 pages long and TMA is working to decipher the rule changes. To see how your specialty is affected by the RVU changes, the average change by specialty is shown on Table 39 starting on page 716. The chart does not factor in the anticipated 21.5 percent cut. Stay tuned.
Physician of the Day
H. David Pope Jr., MD, a family physician from Kerrville, is today’s physician of the day. He graduated from Tulane University School of Medicine in 1955. He is a member of TMA and Kerr-Bandera County Medical Society. The Physician of the Day program is coordinated by the Texas Academy of Family Physicians.
Hotline Available by RSS Feed
Get your daily dose of TMA’s legislative news via RSS feed. TMA Legislative News Hotline is now available via RSS for TMA members and their office staff, and TMA Alliance members. To subscribe, see the RSS Feeds page of the TMA Web site. Once there, you can download an RSS reader, such as Feedreader, Sharpreader, Sage, or NetNewsWire Lite. You also can subscribe to the RSS feeds for TMA news releases; Texas Medicine magazine; TMA Practice E-Tips; and Blogged Arteries, the feed for our Action newsletter.
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Last Published: 7/2/2009 Print this page
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