Sweet Migraines

I received this email via a group in Facebook. Please take a moment to support our neurologists. It will only take a minute of your time. Thanks!

Dear All:

Please take 10 minutes to visit the AHDA website and email your senators. Your help is urgently needed. See the below.

Thanks,

Bray


As you can see, we've just mobilized an action alert to support the Medicare incentive program for neurology in close coordination with the AAN and six other neurological disorder advocacy groups.

Please take just a minute now to visit the AHDA webpage (http://www.capwiz.com/headacheadvocacy/issues/alert/?alertid=14446301&PROCESS=Take+Action ) to email the precise necessary message to your senators to support the Klobuchar amendment to the health care reform bill.

Time is of the essence. The Klobuchar amendment was filed on Monday and we do not know when it will be voted upon by the Senate.

Thanks very much.

Best,

Bob

Robert E. Shapiro, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Neurology

Given Building C219B,
Department of Neurology,
University of Vermont College of Medicine,
89 Beaumont Avenue,
Burlington, VT, 05405

Phone: 802-656-1480
FAX: 802-656-5844
robert.shapiro@uvm.edu
http://www.med.uvm.edu/neurology/WebBio.asp?SiteAreaID=729



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.

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