Sara Cline- January 22, 2010

Although this was a short week (Monday was MLK day), it was jam-packed. As I mentioned in my previous post, this week the American Association of Orthodontists (AAO) were in town. On Tuesday, I watched their information sessions and training, to prepare for the Hill visits on Wednesday. The orthodontists were concerned about how health care reform would affect them as small business owners.
It is embarrassing to say this, but prior to this week, I knew next to nothing about health care reform. Doing some research to prepare for the visits and listening to the training taught me so much! There were a few parts of HC reform that the orthodontists were particularly interested in. The first issue was Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs). If you aren’t familiar with FSAs, they’re accounts were people can put money from their paychecks for medical spending, without it being taxed. Both the House and Senate versions of the HC bill put a limit on FSAs at $2500 (to raise money by having more of peoples’ actual paychecks to tax), which the orthodontists oppose. The majority of orthodontists said that their patients/patients’ parents use FSAs to be able to pay for their braces.
Another thing the orthodontists were concerned about was the red flag rule. I’m not 100% certain I understand it correctly, but this is what I think it means. Certain companies are required under this rule to go through additional steps/protection measures to protect the identities and confidential bank information of their clients. The companies this rule was meant to affect were credit card companies (for example- VISA because they would have all of your personal information), but orthodontists were included because people often pay for their orthodontic work in installments, much like they would with a credit card. Although that is somewhat similar to a credit card, the orthodontists don’t have nearly as much personal information, and there has never been a documented identity theft from an orthodontics office, so the orthodontists were seeking to be excluded from the rule.
Those were the two main concerns of the ADA, but they had a number of other concerns that they wanted to address as well. (Too many to describe in detail.)
On Wednesday teams of 4-5 orthodontists met with members of the House and Senate and their staffers. In meetings where the member was attending, PB lobbyists went to the meetings and assisted. I accompanied the PB lobbyists in the meetings over the course of the day. Since I’m not an ortho, and they were the ones running the meetings, I played a listening role, which was very interesting. I think I learned just as much watching the orthodontists as I did in preparing for the meetings.
On Thursday, I had a meeting with my boss, Kevin, and it seems like from here on out, I’m going to be focusing a lot on the April Greek visits. I had no idea how much work went into them when I participated two years ago. The project I am currently working on is figuring out what current members of Congress were previous sponsors of the Collegiate Housing and Infrastructure Act (CHIA) and seeing if the Greeks met with them last year. There is going to be a lot to do in the coming weeks/months for these visits, but I am extremely interested in it, so the work will be enjoyable!