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According to multiple news sources, Congress has reached a last-minute compromise that will avert the 27.4 percent cut in Medicare physician payment that would have gone through Jan. 1, 2012.

The U.S. House of Representatives agreed to vote on and pass the Senate tax bill, which will provide a two-month extension of the Medicare physician payment rate as well as a two-month extension of Social Security payroll tax cuts and federal unemployment benefits.

The NJAFP is well-represented at the American Academy of Family Physicians Congress of Delegates in Orlando.  Specifically, our issues were front and center at the Town Hall meeting held on Sunday night. Attended by approximately 300 family physician leaders from across the country, one of the major topics discussed was the concept of "distressed practice environments," which the NJAFP originally introduced to the AAFP.

The NJAFP has learned that the Department of Family Medicine at New Jersey Medical School is in jeopardy of being terminated as an independent department, or closed entirely.  While we are concerned that at a time when New Jersey citizens, particularly those citizens in in the greater Newark community, face the prospect of our state becoming a primary care desert, the university would consider closing the only department whose sole mission is the production of the exact primary care physicians so critical to the health of our state now and in the future, we recognize that the support o

The RUC, or the AMA Relative Value Scale Update Committee, makes annual recommendations regarding new and revised physician services to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and performs broad reviews of the RBRVS every five years. In short, it provides support to CMS in determining physician payment schedules. Late last month, the NJAFP board sent a letter to the AAFP board encouraging them to publicly withdraw from the RUC.