IAP president Shaoxiong Chen received an appeal from CAP's Legislation and Political Action  Manager regarding  proposed bill that will "... allow[s] health plans to unilaterally determine the value of physician services and will turn the physician component of hospital care over to their financial control."

The CAP urges you to "make your voice heard on this important issue that may permanently affect your payment and potentially limit patient access to your services."

Here is the contents of the email:

ACTION ALERT: SURPRISE BILLING

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS

You may have seen Congress is quickly advancing surprise medical billing legislative proposals at an alarming rate without properly vetting the potential consequences it could have on your ability to treat patients. Below is a quick recap:

There were several bills and drafts introduced to address surprise billing in both the House and Senate that the CAP has significant concerns with. These legislative proposals include the use of an out-of-network payment methodology exclusively tied to median in-network-rates which is unacceptable to the CAP. It allows health plans to unilaterally determine the value of physician services and will turn the physician component of hospital care over to their financial control. That is a solution that will only benefit the health insurance industry to the detriment of the health care delivery system, and as such, is opposed by the CAP. The CAP cannot support any proposal that supports that provision.

Physician members of Congress, led by Reps. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) and Phil Roe (R-TN), released an outline for legislation that is a positive step in the right direction. As we’re encouraged by the direction of the outline by Reps. Ruiz and Roe, we need you to support them by using the buttons below to contact your member of Congress.

The solutions as proposed by Dr. Ruiz and Dr. Roe would take necessary steps to accomplish our goals of holding patients financially harmless from surprise medical bills while creating a fair reimbursement system that keeps patients out of the middle of billing disputes. In particular, the CAP is pleased to see inclusion of a baseball-style arbitration process that allows consideration for a range of factors, including the usual and customary rate that reflects the market value of physician services. While we are still hopeful that any final proposal will include network adequacy provisions, this is a far better starting point than other proposals we have seen.

Make your voice heard on this important issue that may permanently affect your payment and potentially limit patient access to your services. We look forward to advocating for the Ruiz-Roe proposal to be adopted in place of legislation adverse to pathologists. To contact your legislators now on surprise billing, please click the Send Letter to Legislator(s) button, or if you would like to review and edit the letter please click the Preview/Edit button.

Send letter to Legislators

The IAP has a great deal to look forward to in 2018. The up and coming 69th Spring Slide Seminar, new opportunities for the delivery of CME, and next April’s reaccreditation as an ACCME recognized CME provider continue to fulfill the IAP mission. To better serve the Association, it was definitely time for a website up date. There will be even more improvements in the coming weeks.

I cannot look ahead without casting a glance over my shoulder at the past. The new IAP homepage banner contains one of my favorite images from the Indiana Medical History Museum. This is the illustration centerpiece from a 1938 Indiana physician’s license. 

While the figures of the ancient deities Aesculapius and his daughters Hygeia and Panacea are prominent, we see two putti playing at the feet of the gods. One holds a sprig of foxglove (toxicology) and the other peers into a microscope (cellular pathology) while a retort bubbles to the side (chemistry). This juxtaposition of the symbols of classical medical mythology with those of nineteen century scientific medicine still speaks to the relationship between the laboratory and clinical medicine today. Clinicians are still the most visible to the patient and the public, but the clinical and surgical pathology laboratories form the foundation for diagnosis and treatment. With every year, advancements in technology and a better understanding of disease change the way pathologists practice. In spite of great changes, we can look at the original articles of incorporation for the IAP and see the importance of the founding purposes have little changed over the decades:

…the objects of this organization shall be:

a) To maintain high standards of the practice of medicine through the provision of state-of-the-art pathology expertise and laboratory medicine excellence.

b) To stimulate through education, scientific investigation, and promulgation the results of research both basic and applied in the area of laboratory medicine.

c) To promote the practice of scientific medicine by a wider application of clinical and public health laboratory methods to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease.

d) To promote public knowledge and understanding of the practice of pathology as it relates to the individual, the community, and to the totality of medicine.