http://www.twitter.com/acaonthehillSummer is often a time in Washington where the business of government seems to slow down as everyone starts to look forward to the August recess and dreads the oncoming heat and humidity.  However, this year is a change from years past, as not only has Washington pretty much been spared oppressive temperatures, but the Senate has decided to stick around most of August and the Trump Administration has issued a proposal, and a final regulation, that could very well shape healthcare policy for years to come.

The American Chiropractic Association (ACA) received news recently that the HHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) discovered inappropriate Medicare payments to chiropractors between 2013-2016 caused by a delay on the part of CMS to implement claims processing edits that automatically deny non-covered services. A few media outlets picked up on the report, focusing on the payments, not surprisingly. But there’s more to this story. The OIG report actually found that CMS’s billing edits were largely successful in preventing improper payments, and that most of improper payments were made prior to CMS finally implementing its edits in 2014.

Regular attendees of ACA’s National Chiropractic Leadership Conference (NCLC) have learned to expect nature to play a supporting role during this action-packed event, and this year did not disappoint. With wind storms topping out at more than 70 mph, and the cancelling of votes in the U.S. House of Representatives to make way for the late Rev. Billy Graham to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, NCLC 2018 was especially challenging. Nevertheless, hundreds of chiropractors and students forged ahead, enthusiastically delivering the profession’s message to more than 300 officials and their staff members in the House and Senate.

The inclusion of chiropractic practitioners into various collaborative health systems has increased over the past decade. The addition of chiropractic within these multi-disciplinary settings has been embraced by many as a way to manage spinal conditions, such as back and neck pain, using noninvasive therapies. However, taking a patient-centered approach to such integration involving various health care practitioners leads to new questions and challenges and requires novel research to optimize patient outcomes in these settings.

October is National Chiropractic Health Month, a fitting designation as on Oct. 30, 1972, President Nixon signed into law H.R. 1, the Social Security Amendments of 1972, ending three years of deliberations on what would improve the program. What the president called "landmark legislation" included the significant and far-reaching provision of defining chiropractors as “physicians” in the Medicare program under Sec. 18619(r)(5) of the Social Security Act. Unfortunately, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulators interpreted the law to define the physician status granted to chiropractors in a way that restricted their ability to participate meaningfully, on a level of basic parity.