President's Message

december 2024 

Message from Advocacy Committee Chair

Dear MDACC Members,

Thank you for being an ACC member and supporting the cardiology community! As we wrap up 2024, I’d like to take this opportunity to a) celebrate our 2024 advocacy wins, and b) urgently request your help to replace planned 2025 Medicare physician fee cuts with a physician fee increase.

First, please join me in celebrating our wins:

• Passage of Prior Authorization Bill in Maryland (SB 791) that goes into effect January 1, 2025. Highlights:
• • Mandates a peer-to-peer must occur if requested by a physician (previously this was optional)
  • Mandates the peer reviewer must be knowledgeable in the relevant area through direct clinical experience
  • Mandates automatic approval of PAs if payers don’t meet time limits for response (generally 2 working days or 24 hours for emergencies)
  • Studying whether a “Gold Card Standard” (where clinicians with a high approval rate can be exempt from PAs) should be implemented in Maryland
  • Requiring insurers to use clinical criteria set by non-profit medical/specialty societies instead of “homegrown” criteria.
• Passage of a partial ban on Non-Competes for health care workers in Maryland (HR 1388). Highlights:
• • For healthcare workers making < $350k – new non-competes will be illegal beginning July 1, 2025
  • For healthcare workers making $350k+ - new non-competes will be limited to no more than 1 year/10-mile radius beginning July 1, 2025.
  • If you missed our joint ACC/ACP Town hall webinar with MedChi earlier on this law in the fall, you can watch the recording here.
• Passage of the HEARTS Act in Congress – inspired by Damar Hamlin, this act secures funding for cardiomyopathy awareness and education initiatives, placing AEDs in schools, and providing CPR/AED training to teachers and staff. Special thanks to Tasha Phillips-Wilson, Joseph Marine, Sammy Zakaria, Sriram Padmanabhan, Jelani Grant, Amy Dukovcic, Jae Patton, Angela Street, Aaron Troy and Alex Gyftopoulos for braving a rainy October day to advocate on Capitol Hill for this bill during the ACC Legislative Conference on behalf of the Maryland Chapter.
• Second, an urgent year-end request for all of you: Medicare physician payments will be cut by 2.8% cut in 2025. Advocate for urgent passage of a new bill would counter it with a 4.73% raise.

As most of you know, we’re slated for a devastating 2.8% decrease in the Medicare conversion factor for physician payments despite the rising costs of providing patient care. Historically, Congress has passed year-end stopgap laws to eliminate these cuts, but there is a newly proposed bipartisan bill that would go beyond that and for the first time add a fee increase to account for practice cost inflation. Recent bipartisan legislation (H.R. 10073 Medicare Patient Access and Practice Stabilization Act of 2024) has been proposed to go beyond a short-term elimination of the cut but also increase fee schedules for physician payments by 4.73% for 2025 (2.8% + 1.93%, which is 50% of projected practice cost inflation for 2025). Please use this ACC Action Alert to send a message to your elected representatives ASAP and share with your colleagues: https://www.acc.org/tools-and-practice-support/advocacy-at-the-acc/features/advocacy-action-resources/campaigns?vvsrc=%2FCampaigns%2F118663%2FRespond

Thank you again for being an ACC member. Stay involved with us in 2025 as we continue to advocate for our community and our patients!

Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season and a joyous start to 2025.

Sincerely,

Stanley Liu, MD, FACC

Advocacy Committee Chair

Maryland Chapter ACC

Agenda and registration are here