A Great Week for the Good Guys!
Mike Abrams, Executive Vice President of the Iowa Medical Society
When you blog about health care, there's never a lack of things to cover. But this week Iowa physicians had some especially great things happen.
Lest you worry that IMS is not plugged in enough to federal policymaking, there was a pivotal moment last weekend in the Medicare conversation where Dr. Kitchell, Jeanine Freeman, Karla McHenry, and I were standing in the Des Moines skywalk hunched over my cell phone, which I had on speaker so we could all hear and speak. We were talking with people who were drafting Medicare language to address the Medicare inequity.
Last Tuesday, the language went into the bill during debate in the Senate Finance Committee, thanks to Senator Charles Grassley! The language (you can learn the specifics elsewhere on www.iowamedical.org) would be gigantic for physicians not only in Iowa, but in other sparsely-populated states. We need to express gratitude to Senator Grassley, and continue to apply pressure on the rest of our delegation to see that the language survives the process and is included in any final version of any bill that manages to maneuver through the rest of the process.
The IMS Board had a board retreat the last weekend of September (hence the skywalk huddle) and made some excellent decisions regarding the future direction of your organization. I continue to be so very enthusiastic about IMS' future when I look around our Board table and see the high caliber of physician working on your behalf.
At the Board's meeting following the retreat, they took a number of actions, but some that were especially noteworthy include:
- Approved moving forward on an MBA program for Iowa Medical Society members that will begin in January, 2011. If you've ever thought about getting your MBA, you should look forward to this program. Promotional materials aren't available yet, but if you want more information, e-mail me at and I'll fill you in on some of the details.
- Approved moving forward on Medicare litigation involving Medicare equity. Obviously if we were to succeed legislatively this litigation would be unnecessary.
- Discussed federal and state health reform.
On top of all the good news during our Board Retreat, the Hawkeyes beat Penn State!
