NASS Wants You to Contact Congress – NOW

The North American Spine Society (NASS) is calling all spine specialists to political arms.

The Society wants you to contact your U.S. House Representative immediately to ask them sign a letter co-authored by Reps. Larry Bucshon, MD (R-IN) and Ami Bera, MD (D-CA) urging CMS to revise the 10- and 90- day global services provision in the 2017 Physician Fee Schedule (PFS).

On July 15, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released the PFS proposed rule for calendar year (CY) 2017 which includes a proposal to collect data for ALL 10- and 90-day global services from ALL practitioners who perform these services beginning January 1, 2017.

Specifically, says the Society, the proposal would require any physician who furnishes a procedure that is a 10- or 90-day global code to report the pre- and post-operative services furnished on a claim using a “G-code” for every 10 minute increment of services provided.

NASS is concerned that the CMS proposed rule disregards congressional mandate and will impose an undue administrative burden on spine specialists, disproportionately directing provider resources toward compliance and away from patient care.

The Society says Congress was united in opposition in 2015 to the policy in the CY 2015 PFS final rule that would have transitioned all 10- and 90-day global codes to 0-day global codes beginning in 2017, because of concerns that the change would compromise patient care and significantly increase administrative burdens.

“The proposal CMS included in the PFS for CY 2017 is a clear violation of current law as the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) only requires CMS to gather information needed to value surgical services from a “representative sample” of physicians and to begin using those data in 2019 to facilitate accurate valuation of surgical services, ” states an August 12, 2016 alert.

The NASS Advocacy and Health Policy Councils are currently drafting a comment letter to CMS opposing the proposed 10- and 90-day global services provision. In addition, the NASS Advocacy team is meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to educate members of Congress about this “ill-conceived proposal” and is working to collect signatures for a Congressional sign-on letter asking that CMS not implement this proposal in the final rule.

To find your Congressman or Congresswoman, click here and put your zip code in the upper right hand corner of the page: http://www.house.gov/representatives/