ATS Advocates for Increased Funding; Healthcare Reform
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), center, with (from left to right): Nuala Moore, senior ATS legislative representative; ATS member Linda Nici, M.D.; Eileen Zacharias, Laura Lentz and Debbie Durrer, representing ATS PAR; ATS member Adrienne Prestridge, M.D.; and ATS President-Elect Dean Schraufnagel M.D.
Last month, more than 40 members of the ATS Council of Chapter Representatives (CCR), Clinicians Advisory Committee (CAC), ATS leaders and members of the Public Advisory Roundtable (PAR) visited Capitol Hill to encourage lawmakers to pass legislation to prevent lung disease and advance care for patients with respiratory, critical care and sleep disorders.
“Advocates came from 20 states to raise awareness about the prevalence of lung disease in the U.S. and around the world,” said ATS President J. Randall Curtis, M.D., M.P.H., who attended the annual CCR/PAR Hill Day in early March. “We specifically called for support of a congressional resolution that would officially recognize 2010 as ‘the Year of the Lung.’ Such a resolution will help us in our mission to raise awareness about lung health among the public, initiate action in communities worldwide and advocate for the resources needed to improve lung health and combat lung diseases around the globe.”
ATS members also lobbied for increased funding for federal research programs at the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Veterans Administration. Among the other items on their agenda were advocating for comprehensive healthcare reform that includes meaningfully changing malpractice policies; providing a permanent fix to the sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, which determines how Medicare reimburses physicians; and requiring Medicare to pay for end-of-life care counseling.
Over the course of three days, the ATS clinicians and researchers joined patient advocates in visiting more than 80 House and Senate offices to discuss topics ranging from tobacco cessation to global TB control and prevention. Participants personally met with 13 members of Congress, including representatives Danny Davis (D-IL), Steve Cohen (D-TN), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), David Wu (D-OR), Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Peter Welch (D-VT), Sue Myrick (R-NC), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM). ATS advocates also met with senators Dan Inouye (D-HI), who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Jack Reed (D-RI), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Mark Udall (D-CO).
At a morning session that kicked off ‘Hill Day,’ representatives Steve Kagen (D-WI) and Diana DeGette (D-CO) briefed ATS members on the status of healthcare reform. The news of the day was that President Obama would make an announcement describing his vision for health reform as it moved forward in Congress. Both representatives Kagen and DeGette felt the House would be asked to pass the Senate health reform package and that the reconciliation process would be used for a “technical corrections” bill. While they expressed confidence that the House and Senate would pass health reform legislation, they also highlighted a number of challenging policy and process issues that would need to be addressed before this could happen.
This was followed by a full day of visits with staff members representing other members of Congress, who discussed efforts to control the spread of TB around the world. At an afternoon event, Dan Costa, Sc.D., national program director for Clean Air Research at the Environmental Protection Agency, provided an overview of key regulatory and research activities at the EPA. John Balbus, M.D., public health advisor at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, gave a presentation on major areas in which the NIEHS is investing in environmental respiratory research.
