Volume 25, Issue 2

• Mr. Manuel Bonilla*, Director of Congressional & Political Affairs, gave his regular Legislative Update. He discussed some of his insights and observations from Washington regarding the recent election. There is a strong sense that with the re-election of President Obama and the divided Congress there will be little change from a government that is perceived to accomplish little and only “governs by crisis”.
• The Washington staff is concentrating on finally passing the “Rural Pass-Through” bill this Session and has turned many of its efforts to regulatory activities. The Office has hired new staff and expanded to work with the FDA on the drug shortage situation and with CMS to prevent implementation of payments for interventional pain procedures to non-anesthesiologists.He discussed the recently enacted 2% cut in Medicare provider fees that went into effect on March 1st as part of the “Sequester” that arose from the Budget Control Act of 2011 and as a result of the failure of the Congressional “Super Committee”. He is encouraged by the negotiations in the House Way & Means Committee to come up with a permanent “fix” or repeal of the SGR. This issue presents itself every year (or more often), as ever increasing threats to cut Medicare provider payments to reduce overall spending within the program.Mr. Bonilla introduced Mr. Jason Hansen, the new Director of State Affairs, who detailed much about the expansion with the Office to assist the components with issues around the country. The major issues currently are expansion of scope of practice by lesser-licensed providers and licensure of anesthesiologist assistants. The ASA has developed a new Task Force to provide assistance and financial support to the individual components when help is needed.
• Dr. Erin Sullivan, Chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee, also spoke briefly and assured the members that physician (member) oversight of these activities would remain intact so that members could be confident about how monies were spent.
• The program continued with Mr. Bryan Shuy, Manager of Governmental and Political Outreach and Ms. Roxanne Pipitone, Senior Communications and Public Relations Manager. Their portion relayed many of the public relations activities going on within both ASA Offices and the need to contract with two new companies in both locations to assist with the campaigns. The goal is to heighten awareness by the public of the role of anesthesiology in the peri-operative experience and the importance of the ASA.
• Next Dr. Steven L. Sween, Speaker of the House, gave an update on the building plans for the new ASA Headquarters in Schaumberg. He reviewed the architectural and engineering plans to date with detailed rendering and proposed layouts.
• Lastly, Dr. Richard P. Dutton, Director of Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI), provided the members with some of the activities within the AQI to date. The AQI via its data registry, NACOR, is now receiving records from approximately 15% of the anesthesia practices in the U.S. and has more than 7.5 million records in electronic form on file that have been accumulated over the last three years. With this much data, they are beginning to generate very interesting reports regarding changes in practice demographics, payer mixes, and shifts in practice sites (more off-site cases).

The Board of Directors met at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 3rd.

Items of interest included:

300-1 Administrative Council: Interim Report; this report engendered extensive debate at the Review Committee with many Board members expressing concern about the decision of the Administrative Council to terminate management services for the subspecialty associations. Ultimately, the Board approved the recommendation.