Letter From the President

Dear Fellow ACCP Member:

Over the past several months, I have been involved in many discussions about health system reform with my family, colleagues, and even my patients. I am sure that you have had similar conversations. They have sometimes been intellectually stimulating and other times incredibly frustrating.

As physicians on the front lines of medicine, we all have opinions on the best way to provide quality medical care to our fellow citizens, and these discussions are occurring in every hospital doctors' lounge and office. Some of the ideas have found their way into legislation being discussed by Congress, but many have not. Then, there is the question of what happens if health system reform fails.

The conversations that I have with my patients and their families are equally frustrating. There is little comfort that I can bring to patients who have family members unable to obtain health insurance because of a preexisting condition or because they have lost their jobs and cannot afford coverage. It can be exasperating to try to understand the changing coding and documentation regulations, as well as spend hours with additional paperwork. These barriers prevent all of us from spending important time with our patients--the reason why many of us decided to practice medicine.

The US Congress has a historic opportunity to enact health-care reform legislation. The proposed legislative initiatives are complex. In this regard, it has been very important to give careful thought to how the ACCP should respond when asked if the organization supports any of the legislative initiatives being proposed.

As you know, the ACCP is a multispecialty, multidisciplinary society with more than 14,000 US members (17,500 total members) dedicated to patient-focused care. With this in mind, in July, and again in October of this year, we asked your opinions about what would be important for you if the health system were to be reformed. Based on your responses, the ACCP Government Relations Committee spearheaded the development of a set of principles (PDF) that reflect the overwhelming majority of College members' opinions. These principles will enable us to evaluate legislative proposals and determine if we can lend them our support.

The ACCP believes that health system reform should:

• Provide all Americans with access to affordable and portable health insurance that does not exclude or discriminate against those with preexisting conditions.
• Increase the effectiveness of critical care physicians by providing incentives for telemedicine use in both rural and underserved inpatient critical care settings.
• Fund innovative, patient-centered approaches to critical care that support end-of-life counseling for critically ill patients and their families.
• End the annual cycle of Medicare physician payment cuts.
• Implement strong and effective medical liability reforms to reduce the costs of defensive medicine and medical liability insurance.

We know that not all of you will agree with all of our priorities, and some of you will have additional details that are important to you that were not included in our stated principles. We understand and respect the differing opinions in our membership and believe that this makes us stronger. We want to continue to hear from you. Please feel free to send your comments to ACCP Health Affairs. We also will keep you informed about issues that will impact chest medicine specifically, and medicine generally, as health system reform legislation moves forward.

Sincerely,
Kalpalatha K. Guntupalli, MD, FCCP
ACCP President