ACEP is also strongly urging Congress to continue working to address physician mental health as part of larger policy efforts. Thanks to your advocacy, in 2022, the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act (P.L. 117-105) was signed into law, establishing new programs and providing critical resources to address physician and health care worker mental health and burnout. ACEP continues working with legislators to keep up this critical effort, and is urging Congress to ensure this law honoring the life and legacy of Dr. Breen receives the funding it needs.

Reauthorizing the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act

If there is one thing the experience of the COVID-19 response has shown, it’s that more steps are needed to improve our emergency preparedness infrastructure on all fronts. Congress addressed many pandemic-related needs in the recent year-end package, but the upcoming reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) provides another opportunity to improve our nation’s disaster preparedness plans and infrastructure. As Congress begins the reauthorization effort (its current authorization expires Sept. 30), we are asking them to consider:

• Developing a robust, coordinated national trauma and emergency preparedness system that can provide awareness of resources and surge capacity throughout the health care system;
• Additional efforts to incentivize and operationalize domestic production of essential emergency medications, equipment, and PPE and ensure that distribution of these resources is prioritized for frontline clinicians and first responders;
• Reauthorization of the successful MISSION ZERO program that awards grants to enable military trauma care teams to provide care at civilian trauma centers;
• Protecting our emergency response systems and infrastructure from cyberattacks and other potential vulnerabilities; and
• Promoting research through the NIH’s Office of Emergency Care Research (OECR) to foster basic, translational, and clinical research and research training for the emergency setting.

Medicare’s Promise to Seniors

The annual issue of steep cuts to Medicare physician payments cuts threatens the viability of the health care safety net and puts patient access at risk. We support efforts to provide greater stability and certainty in this system instead of the current perennial task of finding costly, short-term fixes for long-term problems.

ACEP believes the physician community can help deliver on the promise of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) that repealed the flawed Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula, and that with improvements, MACRA can be significantly more effective in facilitating the transition to value-based care delivery. It does not necessitate the wholesale dismantling of the current system, it but does require more regular oversight and iteration to attain a sustainable payment system that truly incentivizes high-quality, cost-effective care—and importantly, it must ensure that emergency physicians and other physician specialties are meaningfully integrated as collaborators.