Health care reform efforts have been stalled since the Massachusetts special election of Scott Brown (R-MA), which ended the Democrat's "supermajority" in the Senate. With Republicans threatening to filibuster the current health care reform proposals, congressional democratic leaders have been reviewing their strategies to pass the reform this year.

On February 7, 2010, President Barack Obama announced that in an attempt to try and salvage the health care reform overhaul, he would gather a bipartisan group of congressional leaders at the White House for a televised health summit on Thursday February 25. Some Democrats have said they hope the President can use the summit to expose Republicans as obstructionists, while Republicans have expressed skepticism about the summit.

On Monday, February 22, President Obama released a health care reform proposal to serve as a starting point for discussions during the summit. The President had never previously offered a legislative proposal in the health debate, choosing instead to propose outlines for the overhaul and leaving the details to Congress.

In the hope of gathering additional support, the President proposes targeted changes to the Senate-passed health care reform bill. The changes include some provisions from the House-passed bill, as well as provisions supported by Republicans. View the Presidential's proposal (PDF, 92K)

Alliance Letter to President Obama

Heart Rhythm Society, as a member of the Alliance of Specialty Medicine, was a signatory on a letter sent February 19 to the President: "As patient and physician advocates, the Alliance welcomes the opportunity to participate in the debate on Medicare and health care reform during the 111th Congress. We sincerely appreciate this historic opportunity to improve access to quality health care through broader health care reform. As you work to develop your own framework for health care reform, we would like to take this opportunity to provide feedback on issues of importance to specialty physicians." Read the complete 2/19/10 letter (PDF, 165K).

Among other issues, the Alliance asks the President to:

• Not include an Independent Payment Advisory Board or any other board resulting in an inappropriate delegation of Congress’s oversight responsibilities
• Provide a permanent fix to the Medicare Physician Payment as part of health care reform
• To exclude the following congressional provisions from the presidential proposal:
• • Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation
  • valued-based purchasing
  • mis-valued physician services
  •  geographic variation
  • physician compare website and
  • hospital readmissions
• To amend the current Health Information Technology timeline
• To include the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative provisions from the House-passed bill (details of the House-passed health care bill)
• To include the Senate provisions for the comparative effectiveness research (details of the Senate-passed health care bill)

The Heart Rhythm Society will be closely monitoring the televised health care reform summit and its related developments and will continue to update Society members and the EP community on health care reform.