AACC is joining other groups in the laboratory community in urging Congress to protect patient access to clinical laboratory services by enacting the Saving Access to Laboratory Services Act (SALSA). The bipartisan and bicameral bill would update the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) payment system for clinical laboratory testing and avoid sharp payment cuts under the 2014 Protecting Access to Medicare Act (PAMA).

Under PAMA, CMS determines reimbursement for laboratory tests billed on the clinical laboratory fee schedule based on a weighted median of private payer rates. But CMS regulations exclude most hospital outreach laboratories and physician office laboratories from data collection. This approach depresses median prices and has led to deep cuts to lab reimbursement. Many tests were cut up to 30% in 2018 when the new system went into effect.

In a letter to congressional leaders, the stakeholders note that “without a sustainable solution to this problem, labs face another round of cuts of up to 15% in January of 2023. This, at a time when we remain at the forefront of patient care and responding to public health disruptions and threats such as COVID-19.”

SALSA would solve the problem by giving CMS new authority to collect private market data through statistically valid sampling from all laboratory segments for the widely available test services, the letter said.

AACC encourages laboratory medicine professionals to write to their representatives about the issue. More information and AACC’s grassroots Laboratory Voice tool are available at www.aacc.org/reimbursement.

Article from Clinical Laboratory News Vol. 48, Number 08, October 2022 an AACC publication.   AACC is the American Association for Clinical Chemistry.