The American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association (AOPA) has long stood at the forefront of O&P legislative strategy, and its 2009 policy forum, held April 22-23 in Washington DC, not only upheld that tradition, it took it farther than it has ever gone before.
At the invitation of AOPA, more than 100 volunteers from 30 states converged on Capitol Hill to become national advocates for the profession. On April 22, a coterie of volunteers that included manufacturers, practitioners, and administrators from as far away as California and Maine participated in education and training sessions that taught the finer points of three legislative issues: parity, O&P’s place in Medicare, and O&P’s place in the larger healthcare-reform debate. Volunteers were schooled in the etiquette of congressional visits, assayed their skills in simulated congressional visits, and came together for keynote speeches by members of Congress. The following day, attendees brushed up on their key messages, then visited Congressional offices in appointments set up by AOPA.
The method behind the visits was informed by AOPA’s Grasstops Initiative, one of the 11 major initiatives developed during AOPA’s 2008 meeting of its board of directors. According to Rick Fleetwood, chair of the AOPA political action committee (PAC) and enthusiastic proponent of Grasstops, the initiative was formed “to get individuals throughout the country active in the current political arena. Its volunteers are commissioned to educate legislators about O&P, raise funds for the PAC, and befriend our legislators—invite them to their facilities back in their home states, show them O&P services firsthand, and assist in doing fundraisers with them.”
Fleetwood counted the visits an AOPA coup. “We visited 49 Senate offices and 55 House offices,” he said, “so in one day on the Hill we talked with one fifth of all of the members of Congress.”
Those visits have already borne fruit, according to Tom Fise, JD, AOPA executive director. With bipartisan support, two major O&P bills have been introduced into the legislative conversation, serving as game pieces in a strategy toward national laws. HR 2575 is the Prosthetic and Custom Orthotic Parity Act of 2009. HR 2479 is the Medicare O&P Improvements Act of 2009. At the time of this writing, an identical set of both bills is planned for the Senate.
These bills are unlikely to be voted on as stand-alone bills, said Fise, but this is part of a larger strategy, positioning them to be incorporated into larger healthcare legislation.
“In the case of the Medicare bill, it is virtually unheard of for an individual-standing Medicare bill to get acted upon,” Fise said. “Generally, it requires a larger bill…like the healthcare reform bill or a tax reform bill, to get into the jurisdiction of the Ways and Means Committee in the House and the Finance Committee in the Senate. Then, you hope that your small bill gets dropped into the bigger pot of things going in this larger bill and it gets adopted. So, we have the bills introduced, in both cases there are a few cosponsors, we’ll try to get more cosponsors, and we hope that if a big piece of legislation comes along, our provisions can be added to it.”
With a major healthcare-reform bill slated for a late-July vote, it’s prime time for O&P to be on the scene. However,
Fleetwood concluded that this will be a long fight: “I told the people at the forum, ‘This is one day. You cannot go to Washington one time a year and just ask people to help you out.’ This is not a one-time shot. You go back, you contact [your legislators], you keep in contact with them; you should know their husband’s or wife’s name…. To do this, you’ve got to develop that kind of relationship.”
