MEMBER ALERT

TO:           AAA Membership

FROM:     Jim McPartlon, AAA President

RE:           Victory!!! Medicare Ambulance Relief Becomes Law!

Last night, the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate both voted to override the President's veto of the physician fix package, which includes Medicare relief for urban and rural ambulance services.  

The House voted 383 to 41 and the Senate voted 70 to 26 to override the veto.  The President had vetoed the legislation earlier in the day.  The package is now law and the ambulance provision takes effect immediately!

The physician fix package, the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (H.R. 6331), contains an 18-month Medicare increase of 2% urban and 3% rural for ambulance service providers.  This relief will begin retroactively from July 1 of this year and expire December 31, 2009.  The ambulance provision provides approximately $170 million in desperately-needed Medicare relief for ambulance services.

Immediately following the veto yesterday of H.R. 6331, the AAA issued a Call To Action requesting AAA member contacts to call and write their Senators in support of overriding the veto.  In a period of only six hours, over 500 contacts were made to Senate offices.  These contacts helped make a real difference in ensuring that the Senate voted to override the veto.

I again want to recognize the enormous effort put forth by our champions in Congress.  Senators Charles Schumer and Kent Conrad and Representatives Mike McNulty, Tom Reynolds, Tom Allen, Chip Pickering and Phil English all helped champion this cause in addition to numerous other members of Congress including Senator Baucus.  Senator Baucus, who is Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and crafted the package, mentioned ambulance services during the debate last night as one of the key groups being helped by the package.  I want to also thank every AAA member organization for writing letters and placing phone calls to Capitol Hill over the past two years to urge support for Medicare ambulance relief.

While we will take today to enjoy our success, tomorrow we will continue our fight for federal fuel tax relief for ambulance service providers and other issues important to AAA members.  We will also continue with developing a long-term, permanent relief proposal which will include a 6% Medicare increase for ambulance service providers as well as additional provisions to benefit rural and urban providers.  Again, thank you for helping push for Medicare ambulance relief.  It was a real team effort and we can all be proud.