As most of you already know, surgeons are facing steep Medicare and other payment cuts in the next 24 to 30 months. Continued reimbursement cuts will result in unsustainable financial strains on surgeons’ practices, jeopardizing patients’ timely access to care. In the near term, changes in the office and outpatient evaluation and management (E/M) codes adopted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will reduce Medicare payments to surgeons by as much as 7 percent starting January 1, 2021. We also anticipate that CMS will propose double-digit cuts in global surgery payments sometime in the future.

Coming together to combat this threat, and to protect and defend the interests of surgeons of all specialties around the country, national surgical organizations, including the American College of Surgeons, have formed the Surgical Care Coalition. The coalition has coalesced around a comprehensive, multi-faceted campaign to educate the public and policymakers about the value of surgeons, and to prevent significant reimbursement cuts.  

While we have engaged experts in a variety of areas to assist us with this effort, we also need your help.

In the coming weeks and months, we will ask you to take action in support of this campaign. Whether it is by responding to surveys, writing your elected officials, or penning an OpEd, your active participation in this campaign is imperative and crucial to its success.

These past months have been an incredibly trying time for every single American. Our country’s health care professionals who continue to fight on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic have had to shoulder an even greater share of the burden. Given the current situation and the role surgeons are playing in it, now is not the time to place further strains on the health care system with steep and unsustainable reimbursement cuts.

We will regularly update you on the coalition’s progress, but in the meantime, please let me know if you have any questions. 

All the best,

Valerie W. Rusch MD, FACS
President, American College of Surgeons
 
Beth H. Sutton, MD, FACS
Chair, Board of Regents, American College of Surgeons
 
L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS
Vice-Chair, Board of Regents, American College of Surgeons
 
David B. Hoyt, MD, FACS
Executive Director, American College of Surgeons

Gary L. Timmerman, MD, FACS
Chair, Health Policy and Advocacy Group, American College of Surgeons