Great News! The final hours of this legislative
session took a favorable turn for physicians of Massachusetts, as the
House and Senate failed to reach a compromise on the health care bill
that they have been working on for the past several months. The two
branches took fundamentally different approaches in their 100-plus-page
bills, and were not able to reconcile them in time for the end of the
session.
This means that several controversial provisions opposed by the MMS did not move forward, including:
- An unfavorable Out of Network billing proposal
- Prohibitively high tax on ambulatory surgery centers and other outpatient providers of surgical and diagnostic care
- Concerning expansions to the scope of practice of nurse practitioners, CRNAs, optometrists, and podiatrists
- The creation – and taxation - of a new category of office-based surgery centers
- Significant increase in physician licensure fees and administrative burdens for physicians offices
We thank our members for their swift and
impactful response to our Legislative Alerts. Your actions helped fuel
our success! House and Senate leadership have expressed their intention
to take up these bills again in January, and we will continue our
staunch advocacy on behalf of patients and physicians as we work with
both branches on this legislation in the future.
Governor Baker’s Opioid bill, the CARE Act, was
passed by the House and Senate and is on his desk to be signed. The MMS
strongly supports the bill, which includes several provisions that we
have long advocated for. The bill will strengthen the statewide standing
order for naloxone. It also includes two proposals originally proposed
by the MMS: the partial fill of prescription opioids, and the
establishment of and funding for an innovative peer-to-peer physician
education program for the care of patients with substance use disorder
and patients with pain. We also support provisions requiring that all
three forms of Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) will be offered in
jails and prisons, through a pilot program. We would have preferred to
see full statewide availability of MAT in jails and prisons, but are
very pleased with this development. In the same vein, the compromise
bill includes a study of the feasibility of Supervised Injection
Facilities in the Commonwealth. The MMS has of course already conducted
such a study, which culminated in our SIF report, and we would have
preferred stronger language allowing DPH to promulgate regulations
establishing a pilot SIF, but we see this study as a promising
development, particularly as Massachusetts is the first state to
establish such legislation. We are also pleased to see that the bill
includes the provision of MAT in emergency departments, as well as
provisions requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant prior to
accessing the prescription monitoring program.
In the past week, the House and Senate have also
passed several other bills that the MMS has long supported. Those that
have been signed by the Governor thus far include a law raising the
legal age for tobacco consumption to age 21, and a law repealing
antiquated provisions that criminalized abortion, which were superseded
by Roe v. Wade.
The Governor has ten days to sign the bills that the legislature passed on Tuesday night. Following the July 31st deadline, the legislature will hold only informal sessions until the start of the next legislative session in January.
