Contact: Kate Dickens 202-225-4165

Washington | June 24, 2010 - Ensuring seniors have access to physicians is vital, and I believe it was important to support the Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries & Pension Relief Act (H.R. 3962), as amended by the Senate, which was signed into law on June 25.  This legislation prevents, through November 30, the scheduled 21 percent cut in the reimbursement rate for physicians under Medicare from being implemented, and instead provides doctors a 2.2 percent increase.  And while the offsets used to pay for this legislation are not ideal, it is important to keep our federal debt from climbing higher.

I am deeply concerned by the scheduled cuts that physicians continue to face under the flawed Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, which threatens access to health care services for seniors in Delaware and across the nation.  Today's vote was yet another short-term fix.  If we do not put a long-term stop to the scheduled cuts, patients will lose access to their physicians, quality of care will decline, and the cost for addressing the problem will only increase.  

There is no doubt in my mind that Medicare must reimburse physicians fairly, and that Medicare beneficiaries must be provided with access to the health care that they need.  However, I believe that the spending by Congress needs to be reigned in—to ensure fiscal solvency we are obliged to pay for what we are spending, especially in health care where costs continue to climb.  The new health care law would have been the more appropriate vehicle to address physician payments under Medicare, however Congress must not dwell on this missed opportunity.

I remain committed to working with physicians in Delaware and my colleagues in Congress on a permanent solution—and while it is never easy to find offsets to pay for this very expensive proposal, I am optimistic we can work together to get this done.