In comments submitted today to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), the CME Coalition applauded the Committee’s 21st Century Cures Initiative, and championed the Committee’s efforts to streamline the implementation of new medical treatments. The CME Coalition understand that unless doctors are given the tools and education they need to implement the newest innovations in medicine, the promise of 21st Century Cures won’t make it to the bedside – and so, we applaud the Committee for including an important provision in their discussion draft (summary here) to ensure that access to continuing medical education (CME) will not be an unintended casualty of unnecessary regulation.
Specifically, the Coalition welcomes the inclusion of a measure—based on legislation (H.R. 293) introduced by Reps. Michael Burgess (R-TX) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR)—which would appropriately exempt CME and certain educational materials from the reporting requirements of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act. While the Sunshine Act intended to make payments to physicians more transparent, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) has ostensibly defied Congressional intent, providing a smattering of regulatory interpretations that have called into question whether continuing medical education events could be subject to the law’s reporting requirements, making them less accessible to physicians. The bipartisan provision included in the Committee’s discussion draft (Section 4381) was authored in response to these unintended consequences, and would ensure that physicians will have necessary access to the innovations in medicine that the 21st Century Cures initiative is intended to stimulate.
The full comments submitted to the Committee are available below.
The full comments submitted to the Committee are available below.
| CME Coalition Comments on 21st Century Cures |
