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The chambers of the Senate Finance Committee served as the breakfast setting for Academy leaders and members May 20 as they honored Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee's chair, with the AAFP National Leadership in Government Service Award.
In presenting the award, AAFP President James Martin, M.D., of San Antonio said, "Sen. Grassley's ability to build consensus across the political spectrum has earned praise from Republican, Democrat and Independent lawmakers. He consistently fights hard for fair treatment of family physicians and their patients."
Earlier in May, the senator took the lead in an effort to remedy geographic discrepancies between rural and nonrural physicians' Medicare payments. He introduced his remedy as an amendment to the Senate version of the federal tax bill.
"Rural providers practice some of the best medicine anywhere -- scholars, think tanks, policy people understand this -- but the Medicare formula doesn't reflect this," Grassley said during the breakfast meeting. "This amendment ends, once and for all, the historic discrimination against rural health care providers."
The Senate passed Grassley's amendment 86-12, but the joint House-Senate conference committee deleted the amendment in its final work on the bill. President Bush signed the tax bill May 28 and noted he did support Grassley's measure that had been deleted from the bill. Whether the amendment would resurface in other legislation was not known at press time.
Grassley, perhaps anticipating the amendment's demise, told AAFP leaders that if the amendment failed to make the cut on the tax bill, he would include it in a wide-ranging Medicare improvement bill that would include prescription drug coverage. "We've got two bites of the apple," Grassley said, referring to the Senate vote and a possible amendment to the prescription drug bill. "We might get three bites -- if we don't get the prescription drug (amendment), then we might try it some other way, as a stand-alone bill or as part of some other bill down the road."
A May 15 Associated Press story on the Grassley amendment quoted AAFP Board Chair Warren Jones, M.D., of Ridgeland, Miss. Jones called the measure a large step toward correcting the inequities between urban and rural health care professionals. He noted that low reimbursement rates have forced many of these professionals to cut staff and offer fewer medical services.
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