Today It’s the Senate Military and Domestic Spending Bill
05/14/2008
Washington, DC - The Senate Appropriations Committee is considering a supplemental appropriations bill that would provide funds for current military operations and expand some GI benefits. However, Physician Hospitals of America (PHA) says this comes at a price of limiting freedom of choice.
“Their plan is to convince the Appropriations Committee, which includes some of the Senate’s most distinguished members, to block Medicare recipients from having access to some of the best hospitals in the country,” says Molly Sandvig, executive director of PHA.
“The big box hospital lobby has been shameless in its efforts to kill any form of competition that might offer Medicare beneficiaries a choice in where they obtain medical care. First, they tried to create controversy in a much-needed bill to improve insurance benefits for people with mental illness. Failing there, they went after the farm bill and tried to justify closing physician owned hospitals as a way to pay for farm programs. Now, they are attempting to use legislation that supports our men and women in the military.”
PHA says it is confident that the Senators on the Appropriations Committee will reject this “ill-advised attempt” to insert a major change in Medicare policy into a defense-spending bill. Even the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Charles Grassley of Iowa, has rejected this effort to bypass the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee, PHA noted.
“PHA and Senator Grassley often disagree on physician ownership of hospitals, but we are of one mind on this point,” Sandvig added. “The debate over hospital choice for Medicare beneficiaries belongs in the Finance Committee, where the issues can be openly and fairly discussed. This is too important an issue for Medicare to be resolved by stealth, but apparently our hospital opponents are afraid of open honest debate and prefer to do their lobbying under the cover of darkness.”
In addition to a growing body of evidence demonstrating the success of efforts by physicians who have left the hospital bureaucracy to start their own patient-centered facilities, a new study reports physician ownership of hospitals “...has no meaningful affect on market-level Medicare expenditures.”
“Our opponents have argued that eliminating physician owned hospitals will save Medicare money,” she noted. “They use a report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that relied on outdated information. We ask CBO to reevaluate their findings based on this new study.”
The study Sandvig cites was conducted by John E. Schneider, PhD, Pengxiang Li, PhD, and Robert L. Ohsfeldt, PhD; Health Economics Consulting Group. Project funding was by an unrestricted grant from PHA.
In other PHA news, the organization developed a video of its industry. See it here.
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