Academy Leadership Sets 2024 Advocacy Priorities

Academy leaders have identified military veterans’ eye care, physician payment reform, reducing practice burdens, ensuring patients’ timely access to needed treatments, and increasing member engagement as some of our top federal advocacy priorities for 2024.

Prioritization was the result of separate meetings last week involving the Academy’s Secretariat for Federal Affairs and the Ophthalmic Leadership Advocacy Group, a group of ophthalmology subspecialty leaders.

With the help of Academy staff in Washington, D.C., our leadership evaluated the opportunities and risks inherent in a divided government with razor thin congressional majorities, and how those issues affect you and your ability to provide high quality care to your patients.

Here are the Academy’s plans in these areas:

Military Veterans’ Eye Care

• Lead an effort at the federal level to preserve the Department of Veteran Affairs’ long-standing directive that only ophthalmologists perform laser eye surgery.
• Continue to work with medicine to ensure that the VA's Federal Supremacy Project does not result in scope-of-practice expansion for optometrists and other nonphysician providers.

Physician Payment

• With organized medicine, press Congress to address long-term Medicare physician payment reform with solutions that preserve fee-for-service and the traditional Merit-Based Incentive Payment System program and reward qualified clinical data registry participation.
• In the absence of reform, work with medicine to address the need for a fair update and additional short-term mitigation measures that Congress may need to enact to address any 2025 Medicare payment cuts.
• Advance the equity for post-operative visits in global surgical payments that could potentially increase payments to ophthalmology by more than 4% or nearly $200 million a year.

Reduce Practice Burdens

• Work with Congress to codify prior authorization reforms for Medicare Advantage plans finalized by CMS into law.
• Work to reinstate the ban on step therapy in Medicare Advantage for Part B drugs.
• Continue to engage directly with Aetna to call for an end to its only remaining prior authorization requirement for cataract procedures in Florida.

Increasing Advocacy Engagement

• Engage Academy members to increase participation in Congressional Advocacy Day and other virtual or in-person opportunities to meet with lawmakers.
• Utilize OPHTHPAC®'s giving strategy to result in new congressional champions, including more physician members of Congress, and increased congressional support for Academy priorities.

Other Key Priorities

• Work to ensure that congressional and regulatory efforts to bolster the health care workforce are beneficial to ophthalmology.
• Support efforts to increase congressional funding for the Pediatric Subspecialty Loan Repayment Program.
• Work with Congress, the Food and Drug Administration and other key stakeholders to reduce drug shortages that affect ophthalmic practices and patients.
• Work to reduce health inequities by increasing access to eye and vision care in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs).
• Support increased federal funding for vision research.
• Academy advocacy has been instrumental in advancing many of our priorities on these issues in 2023. A unified effort by Academy members and the wide ophthalmic community will be instrumental in building on the momentum in 2024.
• Members looking to get involved in these issues can start by investing in the Academy’s OPHTHPAC, ophthalmology's voice on Capitol Hill, and the Academy’s Surgical Scope Fund.
• Register for Mid-Year Forum 2024, April 17-21 in Washington, D.C. You will have an opportunity to discuss these issues directly with members of Congress and urge your representatives and senators to act in the interest of ophthalmology's patients and profession.