Jan. 24, 2012
All patients need a personal primary care physician, such as a family physician, that provides for their care. You need a collaborative partnership with your physician to maintain good health and avoid sickness. Developing a patient-physician relationship is critical for your health care needs.
However, if family physician practices are forced to close their doors, you will no longer have access to your physician or the benefits they provide. A 27.4 percent reduction in Medicare physician payment looms and it threatens to push more than one in 10 family physician practices out of business; your family physician could be one of them.
A congressional conference committee will be deciding over the next few weeks whether to prevent the 27.4 percent reduction in Medicare physician payment set for March 1. If the payment reduction is not prevented, family physicians will be forced into not being able to care for Medicare- and Tricare-insured patients including the elderly, disabled, and members of the military and their families.
And, it does not stop at Medicare and Tricare. Private insurers tend to follow suit and peg their physician payment to Medicare rates. If this happens, even more physicians may be forced to close practices. That means any patient, not just those on Medicare and Tricare, could lose their physician.
We need permanent reform. Congress did pass legislation for a two-month reprieve from the 27.4 percent payment reduction that was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1. That legislation was part of the larger tax bill including a federal payroll holiday and unemployment compensation. However, a temporary extension keeps your doctor’s office open for a short time, but it perpetuates a bad system at increasing cost. As the costs of running a business continues to rise, we need a system that allows doctors to plan their businesses’ future and ensures they remain open to meet their patients’ health care needs.
Family physicians want to provide the best care for their patients and continue their patient-physician relationships.
This is why Congress needs to find a stable Medicare physician payment system that starts with a long-term extension of current payment while Congress replaces the flawed Medicare payment formula.
Colette Willins, M.D.
Family Physician, Westlake, Ohio
President, Ohio Academy of Family Physicians
Contact Information:
25200 Center Ridge Rd Ste 2450
Westlake, OH 44145
Phone: 440.899.4400
E-mail: cwillins@ohioafp.org
Media Contact Information:
Megan Smith, Director of Communications
Ohio Academy of Family Physicians
4075 N. High St
Columbus, OH 43214
Office: 614.267.7867
E-mail: msmith@ohioafp.org
