ACH’s CEO Amanda Pears Kelly was quoted in The Washington Post Health Brief:
The stopgap funding bill, if passed by both chambers, would tackle a number of outstanding health care items that lapsed at the end of September.
- That includes temporarily extending Medicare coverage for more services via telehealth and likely backpay for physicians who have provided those services to Medicare beneficiaries during the shutdown.
- It would also allocate funding for community health centers through the end of January. Community health centers serve more than 32 million patients across the country and receive 70 percent of all their federal funding through the program, which has been renewed in fits and starts over the past two years.
“We’re taking a breath of relief, but the continued short-term patches take a big toll,” Amanda Pears Kelly, the chief executive of industry group Advocates for Community Health, told me Monday morning.