THORACIC SOCIETY PRESIDENT ENCOURAGES FOCUS ON PATIENT CARE IN MEDICAL PROPOSAL

President's Proposal on Coordinated Patient Care Presents Opportunities

Washington, DC (June 29, 1999) - the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), representing heart and lung surgeons, agreed with the President that the Medicare program needs to be reformed and noted that cardiac surgeons had previously made recommendations, including the wider use of global contracting, to the Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.

Nicholas T. Kouchoukos, M.D., President of the STS, while warning against arbitrary budget cuts, encouraged Congress and the President to focus on patients' needs as they consider Medicare reform. "In particular, we believe that the current payment system creates divisions among those who provide care to Medicare beneficiaries."

"Medicare must be structured so that all the medicine's resources, whether they be physicians, hospitals, nurses or others, are directed to the patient," Dr. Kouchoukos said. "Consequently, we believe that global payments should be come a standard option for any qualifying physician hospital group providing a continuum of care for selected conditions."

The STS stated that demonstration projects developed under leadership from cardiac surgeons have shown that combining hospital and physician payments into a unified system can be cost-efficient while maintaining or improving quality. He warned, however, against any assumption that hospitals selected by Medicare for these projects were necessarily better than others in the same cities or states. "Surgical outcomes in any such demonstration projects should be closely watched," he stated, noting that the STS has developed a comprehensive database on cardiac surgery on which quality could be monitored.

"While improved coordination between hospitals and physicians may result in some savings, the real purpose of these reforms of the traditional Medicare program should be to enable heart surgeons to continue with the stead improvement in quality of care that we have achieved in recent years," Dr. Kouchoukos said. He noted that cardiac surgeons have submitted a number of proposals to the Health Care Financing Administration for expansion of these demonstration projects - proposals on which the Health Care Financing Administration has yet to act.

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons is the membership society for thoracic surgeons in the United States. With over 4,100 members, the society represents the surgical practice areas of cardiac surgery (heart),