Okay, I know, I have to stop beating up on the AAFP.  It’s getting old and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel but they do keep sending out these newsletters that make it too hard to stop.   It’s like crack for me.   Here is there latest headline:

AAFP Pounces on Opportunity to Point Out Onerous HHS Regulations

Wow, they really sound aggressive here by pouncing and then pointing things out.  Takes a lot of guts to do that.  I guess they take lessons from the UN?

Let me list stuff the AAFP is objecting to in the article:

• The implementation of the ICD-10-CM code
• The enormous costs physicians bear in providing medical translator services to Medicare and Medicaid patients
• The overlapping documentation and certification requirements
• The Academy called prior authorization phone calls, faxes and paperwork “time wasted” for busy medical practices
• The improvement of the Medicare physician enrollment process, calling it the “largest and most persistent source of physician frustrations” with Medicare
• To streamline and coordinate claims review processes currently conducted by multiple HHS contractors
• To implement administrative simplification processes included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act immediately,
• To reevaluate signature requirements associated with insurance payers’ requests for additional documentation
• To free physicians from the current complicated requirements for prescribing supplies for patients with diabetes
• Cain also used his letter to HHS to reiterate the AAFP’s long-standing cry for more appropriate pay for family physicians
• The AAFP argued for the creation of separate primary care evaluation and management codes for office or other outpatient services to patients.

After listing all this garbage I realized that if one was to apply Occam’s Razor, like we so often do in treating patients, that the way to fix all this is to go into Direct Primary Care.  None of the above would apply!  If the AAFP just said to (or threatened) the government that their next step would be to help, promote, market and enable their members to go into Direct Primary Care then they make some headroom with the HHS.  But, alas, the AAFP sticks its nose up in the air and snubs this small but growing splinter group of docs and instead chooses to pounce themselves and their members into extinction.