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Florida’s Largest Physician Group Sounds Alarm on Senate Health Care Bill
A stealth provision that would undermine state damage caps
Health Care Overhaul Proposals Comparisons
Letter to AMA President James Rohack, MD, AMA President-Elect Cecil Wilson, MD
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The Florida Medical Association, which represents over 20,000 Florida physicians and medical students, believes national health care reform is too important to be implemented poorly. That’s why we’re urging the U.S. Senate to put the brakes on HR 3590, which is full of alarming provisions that compromise the bedrock patient/physician relationship, while failing to address the real issues behind rising health care costs.
Overall, HR 3590 is bad policy that fails in the following critical areas:
- It creates new layers of bureaucracy and allows the federal government to arbitrarily reduce payments for specialty care that could save patients’ lives.
- Inappropriately, it expands the government’s role in determining the quality of medical care. It would require physicians to participate in flawed “efficiency” programs that essentially penalize some doctors for pursuing the best course of care for their patients.
- It doesn’t fix the broken Medicare physician payment system and envisions deep reimbursement cuts that will force many doctors to reduce the number of Medicare patients they treat. In Florida, with its large population of senior citizen, this could lead to a health care access crisis.
- It doesn’t address medical liability reform, an essential cost containment element that has been shown to significantly lower health care costs. Effective liability reform discourages the practice of defensive medicine, which is expensive, and eliminates unnecessary litigation from the system.
- At a time when states are in economic distress, it expands the failed Medicaid program, adding 1.4 million to 1.7 million more people to Florida’s rolls alone. In addition to being financially irresponsible, it exacerbates the problem Florida’s Medicaid patients already face with lack of access to care.
- It will cause millions of Americans to lose their existing private coverage, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 24 million people will still lack health insurance coverage.
The FMA supports meaningful, financially responsible health care reform — and HR 3590 is anything but. Our message to the U.S. Senate is simple: Don’t rush reform. Do it right.
