Development of Independent RVS Advisory Board

Introduced by: William Gillanders, MD, S. Miles Rudd, MD

WHEREAS, inadequate payment rates set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have resulted in increasing numbers of physicians closing their practices to Medicare patients, and

WHEREAS, CMS sets payment rates based on CPT coding by annual updates to the Medicare Relative Value Scale (RVS), and

WHEREAS, CMS is advised in this process by the AMA/Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Update Committee (RUC), and

WHEREAS, only three of the twenty-six voting members (11.5%) of the RUC are from primary care specialty societies, despite the fact that primary care physicians represent over 33% of the physician workforce and provide 50% of the Medicare physician visits, and

WHEREAS, requests by the AAFP to the AMA to restructure representation on the RUC have met with repeated failure, and

WHEREAS, independent action by CMS to improve payment to primary care physicians with likely concurrent reductions in payment to non-primary care specialists would help to stem the waning access to care that afflicts the Medicare-eligible US population, and

WHEREAS, such a change is likely impossible by CMS working with the highly non-primary care specialty weighted RUC; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the OAFP send a resolution to the AAFP Congress of Delegates asking the AAFP to petition CMS to develop an independent RVS Advisory Board with membership representative of the current physician workforce providing care to Medicare recipients or mandate representative restructuring of the RUC.

Oregon Academy of Family Physicians
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