Communication at (512) 370-1390, or email
debra.heater@texmed.org.
WWAD Texas is funded by a grant from the TMA Foundation with generous support from the TMA Insurance Trust and Prudential.
Texas physicians offer 50 ways to fix MACRA
TMA SENT a 27-page formal com- ment letter to the Centers for Medi- care & Medicaid Services (CMS) list- ing TMA’s 50 recommendations to improve the agency’s draft rule im- plementing the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) (See “MACRA: Fix or Folly?” pages 41–47.)
When Congress passed MACRA
“If implemented as written, the regulations would dump additional bureaucratic work on physicians and their practices.”
last year to replace Medicare’s Sus- tainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, lawmakers aimed to improve Medi- care’s costly and complex programs — such as the Physician Quality Report- ing System (PQRS), meaningful use,
and value-based purchasing — that purport to measure the quality of care physicians provide. TMA says MA- CRA has fallen far short of that goal. “If implemented as written, the
regulations would dump additional bureaucratic work on physicians and their practices, and would continue to impose onerous federal controls on them — with no data to show that they would improve the quality of or access to care for patients,” said TMA President Don R. Read, MD. “The sys- tem devised by CMS is far more costly, complex, and confusing than the cost- ly, complex, and confusing programs it is replacing.” The most critical of TMA’s 50 rec- ommendations are these:
• Significantly expand the low- volume threshold: According to TMA’s analysis, physicians who bill less than $250,000 in Medicare charges will spend more trying to comply with the MACRA rule than they could ever earn in bonuses if they hit the hidden quality targets. CMS set the threshold at a pal-
The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School welcomed its first batch of medical students, including Sabah Akbani, front right, in late June with a ceremony held at the school’s Health Learn- ing Building. Dean Clay Johnston, MD, greeted Ms. Akbani and her new classmates during the event.
18 TEXAS MEDICINE September 2016
PHOTO BY MARSHA MILLER
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