Rick Pollack urges President Obama to protect the health care promised to program beneficiaries in your fiscal year (FY) 2015 Federal Budget by not including further reductions in payments for hospital services provided to seniors and the disabled under Medicare.
Letters
Throughout the year, the AHA comments on a vast number of proposed and interim final rules put forth by the federal regulatory agencies. In addition, AHA communicates with federal legislators to convey the hospital field's position on potential legislative changes that would impact patients and patient care. Below are the most recent letters from the AHA to these bodies.
Latest
The undersigned organizations write to express immediate concerns confronting our respective members’ ability to comply with the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program.
H.R.3991 would amend the Social Security Act to remove the condition of payment but leave the condition of participation intact. A physician would not be required to state that the patient will be discharged or transferred in less than 96 hours in order for the CAH to be paid on that particular claim.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) is pleased to support the Critical Access Hospital Relief Act (S.2037). This legislation would remove the 96-hour physician certification requirement as a condition of payment for critical access hospitals (CAHs).
America’s hospitals strongly oppose a proposal to cut funding for seniors’ Medicare to pay for an extension of the debt limit. While we do not oppose the extension of the debt limit, we do oppose using Medicare reductions to pay for non-Medicare related spending.
We would like to highlight two issues of particular concern and provide context for reviewing the detailed comments: 1) minimizing unnecessary burden and expense for multi-hospital systems that utilize centralized credentialing by allowing for a single query regarding a physician on behalf of all of the hospitals to which the physician is applying or at which the physician currently practices; and 2) eliminating the unnecessary confusion and uncertainty created about the meaning of “investigation” by continuing to permit hospitals to define when an investigation begins in the medical staff bylaws.
Moving forward, we urge the Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) to take additional steps to more concretely enhance the alignment of quality measurement reporting and payment efforts.
The AHA supports several aspects of CMS’s proposed framework and measures list for the QRS. However, we are concerned that the measures list seems more like a list of available and potentially implementable measures, rather than a list chosen to advance underlying strategic priorities.
Delays of at least two years in granting an ALJ hearing for an appealed claim are not only unacceptable, they are a direct violation of Medicare statute that requires ALJs to issue a decision within 90 days of receiving the request for hearing.
AHA Urges Congress to Support RAC Reforms after Long Delays in Assignment of Hospital Appeals to ALJ
The need for fundamental RAC relief has become even more apparent and urgent by operational changes described in the attached memo from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals (OMHA).