Monday, November 10, 2014

Medicare Therapy Caps Sponsor Numbers Surpass Goal

I know this is good work but overall this is the wrong place to focus efforts. The effort should be on creating a National Stroke Plan similar to the National Alzheimers Plan. That way we actually will have created a strategy to follow and can tackle all of the problems in stroke.  This effort is just part of the godamned lazy press release notices that never get at the real work needed in stroke. Until they get a survivor in there to actually kick some butt and fire people will stroke associations actually work for the best needs of survivors.
http://www.stroke.org/newsletter/stroke-advocacy-network-enews-november-2014#article1
The Stroke Advocacy Network (SAN) has worked diligently to push legislation in the House (H.R. 713) and the Senate (S.367) that would permanently repeal the $1,920 cap on occupational and $1,920 for speech and physical therapy services for Medicare recipients. This fall, SAN joined a larger campaign in an effort to secure a bipartisan majority of legislators co-sponsoring the repeal, which would put pressure on Congressional leadership to hold a vote on the bills. The target number of co-sponsors for the repeal was 218 Representatives in the House and 51 Senators in the Senate. Fortunately, SAN and coalition partners surpassed the goal for the House bill with 222 co-sponsors. Although we have not yet achieved a full repeal, this is a major milestone in SAN’s advocacy efforts and we would like to thank everyone who participated in the campaign.
What does this mean for the future?  While this is just one step on the journey toward making the caps a thing of the past, it’s an important step.  For the last 17 years, stroke survivors on Medicare who have reached the caps have had to manage their care on a piecemeal basis, through a difficult exceptions process. While Congress has extended the exceptions process annually, with the current exception expiring on March 31, 2015, this is not enough. When the new Congressional session starts in January, your job as a member of the Stroke Advocacy Network will be to help returning and new members of Congress.

More at link

No comments:

Post a Comment