Sept. 12, 2023
By Tochi Iroku-Malize, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A.
AAFP President
Facts may speak for themselves, but static easily drowns them out — especially when the truth is on your side. That’s why the AAFP is speaking out loudly about Medicare add-on Code G2211, and why your voice is needed, too.
As Stephanie Quinn, the AAFP’s senior vice president of advocacy, practice advancement and policy, told you recently, G2211 is a long-planned, straightforward and vital correction designed to appropriately pay for the comprehensive, longitudinal care we deliver. Its full implementation next year would improve primary care access for Americans and lead to better patient health outcomes. Yet G2211 has attracted attacks from some medical specialties, putting that implementation at risk.
These objections are static: noise from a status quo defined by decades of inadequate Medicare pay for primary care and longstanding misapprehension — even within the house of medicine — of primary care’s role and importance in our health care system. G2211 doesn’t solve the failures of investment and imagination that have arrested our workforce numbers and led to maldistribution of clinicians. However, it absolutely does affirm that policymakers grasp the criticality of our work, thanks to the AAFP’s advocacy.
The Academy is now turning its advocacy to face this wave of shortsighted hostility and push G2211 across the finish line. You can see some of this work on the Academy’s new G2211 page, which lays out our strong case for the code, dismantles several falsehoods being leveraged against it and includes a link to the AAFP’s Speak Out tool to help you contact your members of Congress directly.
As you’ll see on this G2211 page, the facts bear out our position:
The AAFP is also calling on Congress to address the true problems with Medicare payment: the program’s outdated, inflation-blind physician fee schedule. We’ve said again and again that Medicare physician payment has failed to keep up with the cost of running a physician practice; it also continues to suffer from an arbitrary budget-neutrality requirement that unnecessarily pits physician specialties against one another. This is the source of the static. Of course other specialties oppose G2211; statute dictates that implementing the code will lessen their own Medicare payment.
But as the facts above demonstrate, G2211 is not disruptive enough to justify pulling the emergency brake and hurting the majority of Medicare patients, who all deserve robust primary care. G2211 is a substantial investment in primary care, one requiring no upfront federal spending, and it must go into effect as planned next year. It is the best way to stabilize primary care — the country’s largest health care delivery platform — under the nation’s biggest and most influential insurance payer. It is the best way to protect Medicare beneficiaries’ access to essential primary care while overdue systemic change is finally undertaken.
Every clinician knows that Congress must fix budget neutrality and add inflationary updates to the physician fee schedule. Everyone grasps that unnecessary payment reductions are a barrier to care for a growing and aging population. These are the facts, and they require action.
Tochi Iroku-Malize, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., is president of the AAFP.
Disclaimer
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