Please Email Your Senators to Support the Klobuchar / Collins Amendment

I just got an email from the AHDA asking me to write to my senators. All you have to do is fill out their form and if you want, type up a brief paragraph of your own (they provide text for the email). They get your email to your specific senators. It couldn't be easier and I believe it is very important. Terri Robert is one of the signatories. Here is the text of the email I received:

Please Email Your Senators to Support the Klobuchar / Collins Amendment
Dear AHDA advocates:


The AHDA is dedicated to improving the welfare of individuals suffering from headache disorders. Our near-term goals have focused on increasing NIH funding for headache disorders to lead to improved therapies. However, the health care reform bill currently being debated in Congress has forced us to take action in a slightly different direction to protect access to quality medical care for patients with headache disorders.


The Senate Health Care Reform Bill contains a particular provision to provide bonus Medicare payments to doctors from certain primary care specialties. This is a very good idea. It is intended to incentivize and encourage doctors to enter and stay in primary care practice.

Physicians who specialize in headache medicine provide primary or principal care for patients with headache disorders and more than 90% of them are neurologists. Unfortunately, neurologists have been unaccountably left out of eligibility for these bonuses. If the Health Reform Bill passes with the incentive program as it is written, it will significantly undermine the ability to recruit and retain doctors to the field of headache medicine. Headache doctors are already very scarce, and it will become that much harder to find one.


What can we do? Fortunately, Sen Klobuchar of Minnesota, along with Sen Collins of Maine and Senator Brown of Ohio, have offered a bipartisan amendment to the Senate Health Care Reform Bill that would add neurologists to the Medicare incentive program. We, at the AHDA, have added our voice of support for this amendment to those of other national groups with interests in patients with neurological diseases, including the American Academy of Neurology, the ALS Association, the Parkinson's Action Network, the Epilepsy Foundation, the Brain Injury Association of America, the Alzheimer's Foundation of America, and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.


We are asking you to contact your two Senators right now through our website to urge them to co-sponsor the Klobuchar amendment. Doing this is as easy as just a few mouse clicks. Please do it as soon as possible. Also, please forward this email and ask everyone that you know that cares about someone with a neurological disorder to do so now too. The Klobuchar amendment will be voted upon by the Senate any day now.

To email your Senators, click HERE.
It's easy and should take you 10 minutes or less.



Thank you very much.


Best regards,


Bob Shapiro
Bill Young
Brad Klein
Teri Robert

I got it too. I forwarded the letter it to as many people as I could think of asking for their support, after first sending the notification to my senators. Hoping friends and family can notify their senators in our behalf as they're all too aware of the toll headache disorder has on my life.

Thanks!

Becky

What does this actually mean?

I think it has something to do with this:

Physicians who specialize in headache medicine provide primary or principal care for patients with headache disorders and more than 90% of them are neurologists. Unfortunately, neurologists have been unaccountably left out of eligibility for these bonuses. If the Health Reform Bill passes with the incentive program as it is written, it will significantly undermine the ability to recruit and retain doctors to the field of headache medicine. Headache doctors are already very scarce, and it will become that much harder to find one.


What can we do? Fortunately, Sen Klobuchar of Minnesota, along with Sen Collins of Maine and Senator Brown of Ohio, have offered a bipartisan amendment to the Senate Health Care Reform Bill that would add neurologists to the Medicare incentive program.

Risa

Thanks for posting this, AND thanks to all of you who have written to your Senators.

Teri

I received a form letter response to my email from one of my senators. It was evident he (or his staff) did not read the email or my comments. It makes me upset.

I also forwarded the message to all my friends and family, hoping they would email their senators too.

Wish there was something else we could do that would make a difference.

Becky

Hi, Becky!

I hear you on wanting to do something! Did you sign up for the AHDA mailing list so you'll get an email when there are opportunities to send emails on important issues?

The emails everyone has written through the AHDA alerts HAVE made a difference over the last few years. For both 2009 and 2010, we got "report language" attached to both the House and Senate appropriations bills, instructing the NIH to pay more attention to funding research on Migraine and other headache disorders. We haven't seen an increase in funding yet, but with report language, it will have to happen.

AHDA advocates are heading to Washington again in February to lobby Congress again.

Teri

Thanks, Teri! I double-checked and I am signed up for the emails at the AHDA site (that's probably why I got the same email Leslie posted).

I also signed up to see how my state reps are voting.

Becky