Contents tagged with president's letter
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President's Letter
Keeping up the fight for family medicine through the pandemic
By Amer Shakil, MD, MBA
TAFP PresidentGreetings members. What a strange year and a half its been for all of us. As life is slowly and cautiously beginning to return to something akin to normal, we should take a moment to acknowledge the struggles and the achievements we have experienced, both individually and as a specialty. Over these several months, the resilience of family physicians, our physician colleagues, other health care providers, and aides of all sorts has been nothing short of amazing.
I have also marveled at the resilience of our Academy. In February of 2020, it seemed unimaginable that we would cancel April’s C. Frank Webber Lectureship and Interim Session. And then it became obvious that we couldn’t possibly hold the meeting. The Academy would go on to learn to produce virtual conferences, and that’s how we would conduct business for the rest of the year.
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President's Letter
The best laid plans of mice and men
By Javier “Jake” Margo Jr., MD
TAFP PresidentI don’t know about y’all, but man, I have really been looking forward to this summer because there’s been something special on my calendar — something I have always wanted to do since I attended summer Scout camp back when I was a kid. For the first time since I became a Scout, I have plans to attend Boy Scout summer camp for an entire week, this time as a counselor! It happens to be at the longest continuously operating Boy Scout camp in Texas, the same camp my grandfather and my father went to, and the same one my son attended as a Cub Scout.
And I also have on my calendar a plan to take my family for a half week of amazing fun at the Boy Scouts of America Family Adventure Camp at the world famous Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. That’s right. I have a plan to introduce my family to one of the BSA’s four high adventure bases. Attending this camp is widely regarded as a pinnacle experience in scouting, particularly by those of us who were fortunate enough to have attended as Scouts.
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MACRA and managing change
By Ajay Gupta, MD
TAFP President, 2015-2016As many of you are acutely aware, our health care delivery system is undergoing dramatic changes. For those of you who have been around as long as I have, this has been a similar theme for several years. One common phrase I have heard over the years is the idea of “change.” Many of us have been frustrated by the changes in the past. These changes have been unfavorable for family medicine. One thing is clear: the current system is broken and unsustainable.
Every day patients ask my opinion on these changes. Will it help family medicine? Will private practice survive? What’s going to happen to you and your colleagues? I respond by telling them I feel our current system is indeed broken.
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Texas Family Physician - Vol. 67 No. 2, Spring 2016
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President’s letter
Perspective
CONTENTS
TMF Health Quality Institute: Helping you succeed in the transformation from volume to value is … more
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Texas Family Physician - Vol. 67 No. 1, Winter 2016
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Perspective
CONTENTS
Texas Family Physician of the Year 2015-16: Antonio Falcon, MDBorn and bred in Rio Grande City, … more
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Strength in numbers
An adaptation of the 2015-2016 incoming president’s address
By Ajay Gupta, MD
TAFP President, 2015-2016Greetings colleagues. I am humbled and honored to serve as president of this extraordinary Academy and I want to thank all of those leaders and physicians who have mentored me and guided me along the way as well as my wonderful family for their steadfast support.
I became involved in the Texas Academy in my second year of practice because it equipped me with the tools to make my practice better. As you know, TAFP provides some of the best CME available and is produced for family physicians by family physicians. The Academy has helped me maintain board certification, which as you all are aware is an important process and not easy to do. The Academy also provides a range of practice support services to help my practice be more efficient. At our statewide meetings I get the chance to network with other family physicians to hear about the latest trends in health care delivery and payment—what’s working and what’s not working.
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Texas Family Physician - Vol. 66 No. 4, Fall 2015
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Telemedicine: A disruptive revolutionPatients value access and convenience above all else and … more
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Time to step up to the plate
By Dale Ragle, MD
TAFP President, 2014-2015This will be my final letter to you as TAFP president. It has been an honor and privilege to serve you and our outstanding organization.
This is an exciting and challenging time for family medicine. Health care reform and the sustainable growth rate repeal are expanding the rolls of the insured and will transition us from a volume-based payment system to a quality-based system over the next several years. Some analysts are concerned that increasing the number of insured may strain our health care system in the absence of increasing the physician workforce. While increasing the insurance rolls will generally increase access to care in the younger population, the resultant strain on our health care system could make it more difficult for certain vulnerable populations, such as elderly patients already on Medicare, to access the health system. This effect could be magnified in our state, which has about a 20 percent uninsured rate, unfortunately the highest in the nation.
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Texas Family Physician - Vol. 66 No. 3, Summer 2015
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CONTENTS
Inside the coverage gapTexas is the only state left with at least 20 percent of its population … more
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The brave new world of the SGR repeal
By Dale Ragle, MD
TAFP President, 2014-2015On April 16, 2015, President Obama signed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, which phases out Medicare’s flawed sustainable growth rate payment formula over the next 10 years. The so-called “doc fix” enjoyed bipartisan and bicameral support in Congress, a rare phenomenon these days, as well as support from most major medical organizations, including AAFP and the American Medical Association. In spite of broad support, the bill took more than a year of tweaking and survived innumerable negotiations between both political parties and the White House, a testament to the adage that “the devil is in the details.”
The SGR formula tied Medicare expenditures to the gross domestic product. Since demand and utilization of health care services do not rise and fall directly with the ebbs and flows of the general economy, the SGR often threatened to cut physician fees year after year. Perennially, Congress passed special legislation to delay the fee cuts, often only finding they have to repeat the action in the following year.
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