Earlier today, Do No Harm submitted an official comment to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in response to the agency’s formal reconsideration of the relationship between the American Medical Association (AMA) and the medical coding standards that define clinical practice.
We support this inquiry and urge CMS to treat its Request for Information as the beginning of necessary reform rather than the end.
Federal regulation has long entrenched a single private association’s monopoly over the code set that defines physician services, and the revenue that flows from that monopoly is neither spent for the benefit of patients nor answerable to the physicians the AMA claims to speak for. That alone justifies the agency’s decision to ask these questions and to keep pursuing the answers.
This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that the AMA spends freely on political advocacy, using its medical authority to inappropriately prop up its activism.
Patients and the public need a payment system built on codes that align with medical necessity rather than on a copyright that funds activism. Thus, CMS is right to have opened this question, and the answer should not be the current, damaging status quo.
Please read the full comment here or below.
