In August members of Congress heads back to their districts during recess. This is the perfect time to schedule in-district meetings with your members of Congress to discuss the importance of respiratory care and legislation to reform the current supplemental oxygen reimbursement process. It is vital that members of Congress hear from you, their constituents, about the importance of these issues so that they prioritize them.
If you are interested in meeting with your members of Congress to discuss the importance of respiratory care services, as well as to ask for their support for upcoming legislation on supplemental oxygen, then here is what you should do:
- Make an appointment with their office to meet in the district.
- Review the attached Four Pillars of Oxygen Reform Document. This summarizes the proposed changes we are requesting regarding supplemental oxygen.
- In the meeting review the Four Pillars — tell a patient story and emphasize the need for pillar 3 to pay for respiratory therapists to see patients.
- Send an email to miriam.oday@aarc.org with a brief one or two sentence recap.
Thank you for your willingness to participate in these important in-district meetings to improve access to respiratory care and to reform the supplemental oxygen reimbursement process.
Four Pillars for Oxygen Reform
- Ensure supplemental oxygen is patient-centric.
- Change “home oxygen” to “supplemental oxygen” to ensure people requiring oxygen can live full lives outside their primary residence.
- Create a patients’ bill of rights to ensure care is focused on patient needs.
- Ensure access to liquid oxygen for patients for whom it is medically necessary.
- Create a statutory service element to provide adequate reimbursement for respiratory therapists to ensure patients have access to their expertise.
- To ensure predictable and adequate reimbursement and to protect against fraud and abuse, establish national standardized documentation requirements that rely upon a template rather than prescriber medical records to support claims for supplemental oxygen suppliers.
How to Set Up a Meeting
We encourage you to look over this helpful guide on how to request a meeting with a member of Congress.
Email Template
Dear Congressman/Congresswoman/Senator (insert name)
ATT: Scheduler (insert name) and Health Legislative Assistant
My name is _______________ and I Iive in (town/city) and you are my Representative in Congress. I am a respiratory therapist employed at (name employer).
I am a member of my professional association, the _______________ Society for Respiratory Care (_SRC), which represents the interests, including mine, of nearly _______________ licensed respiratory therapists in our state.
On September 27, 2023 I will be in Washington, D.C. as part of our professional association the American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC) annual Capitol Hill day. We will be advocating on issues important to Medicare pulmonary patients and the profession of respiratory therapy.
I would very much like to take 15 minutes of your time to meet with you or your staff to talk about the critical role respiratory therapists play in the lives of pulmonary patients.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
(your name and home address with zip code)
