Endocrine Insider
October 28, 2009

(See Full Issue)

Recently, The Endocrine Society informed its physician members  that Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) had introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate known as the "Medicare Physicians Fairness Act" (S. 1776). This legislation would have repealed the flawed sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula currently used to establish annual Medicare physician payment updates. The bill did not set a new payment system; instead, it  proposed to reset the budget baseline and to erase the deficit that the reimbursement system has accumulated over the past few years—a debt that is scheduled to cause a 21.5 percent cut to physician payments in January 2010 without congressional action to stop it. The passage of this bill would have also cleared the way for the creation of a new payment system under health reform or other legislation currently moving through both houses of Congress. However, a procedural vote that occurred in the Senate last week failed to pass, and as a result, S. 1776 did not move forward for final approval.

The medical community, including members of The Endocrine Society, generated more than 40,000 phone calls to the Senate in an effort to encourage passage of this S. 1776. Despite the failure of this bill, The Endocrine Society continues to press Congress for an SGR fix to be included as part of health system reform or other legislation. There is an excellent case for repealing the SGR sooner rather than later. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that repealing the SGR in 2006 would have cost $127.2 billion. Today, that cost has risen to $285 billion, and it keeps rising every year that Congress does not act to repeal this flawed formula. Without a permanent solution to the SGR, many physicians will be forced to stop seeing Medicare patients.

The Endocrine Society will continue to advocate for meaningful health reform, including the repeal of the SGR.