Archives
June 20, 2007
Senator Max Baucus
Senate Hart Office Building
Room 507
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Baucus,
I am following up on a letter you received last month (May 8, 2007), signed by over 100 Montana pharmacists urging your favorable consideration of the Medicare Part D prompt payment legislation working its way through Congress.
HR 1474 has been introduced in the House of Representatives. It requires prompt payment (15 days) of clean claims submitted to the PDPs under Medicare Part D. Rep. Rehberg has co-sponsored HR 1474. We hope you will support a companion bill if it is introduced in the Senate. Or perhaps you would even consider introducing a Senate version of HR 1474 yourself?
It seems incredulous to me that it would take a federal law to get these PDPs to do what you and I do all the time: pay our bills in a timely fashion. But that’s what it has come to. In fact, we do need a federal law to get these PDPs to do the right thing by the thousands of pharmacies they are doing Part D business with.
I know we Montana pharmacists have asked a great deal of you this past year. Your willingness to meet with us, your many discussions with our immediate past president, Vince Colucci, your invitations to Tobey Schule to provide testimony to the Senate Finance Committee—all this is deeply appreciated. Further, I realize we touched on many topics important to this profession. We’ve shared with you our deeply held beliefs on where this profession needs to go in order to deliver its full value to elderly persons in every Montana community. We have discussed some very important ‘big picture’ and ‘long term’ issues with you: provider status for pharmacists under Medicare Part B; reforms in Part D that would authorize pharmacist to provide MTM services independently of the PDPs; greater regulatory authority for state pharmacy licensing Boards, etc.
We must also be—and we are-- concerned with the short term economic realities these small businesses face every day in the marketplace—and that is why prompt payment legislation is so important right now. As the May 8th letter to you says: pharmacies have bills to pay, too. They suffer, and their patients suffer, when payment for services is delayed, held up for petty bureaucratic reasons, or when it gets bogged down in the various administrative labryinths created by the PDPs.
Please take this issue under consideration, along with everything else we have discussed this last year or so. Thanks in advance for any help you can give us with this one, Senator Baucus.
Sincerely,
Jim Seifert, R.Ph.
President 2007-2008