Scott Sellinger: Thanks, Phil. My pleasure to be here.
Phillip Koo: So before we get into the topic about the government shutdown, I wanted to congratulate you on another great year leading a wonderful, wonderful organization. And I know you have your annual meeting coming up in a couple of weeks. So can you provide the listeners an update on what to expect at the next annual meeting?
Scott Sellinger: Sure. Well, every year we invite hundreds of our members in our groups to attend our annual meeting and also industry. So we have a huge sponsorship that goes on with our meeting in Chicago. This year we're going to be starting off with a CME program on Thursday, and then we also have a practice administrators program, which we'll run all day on Thursday. And then on Friday and Saturday, we typically hit our highlights of what we do throughout the year. And a lot of it is really focused on advocacy work that we do in Washington, DC.
Phillip Koo: As someone who's been to several of those annual meetings, I can attest that it's great. Great content, great networking, great people. So for those of you who are considering it, make sure you attend. All right, so we're going to shift gears and talk about the government shutdown. So whenever we hear about government shutdowns on the federal level, it's interesting. We hear about air traffic control, how it's going to impact flying, how it's going to affect our national parks, but you know very well that it's much, much bigger than this so tell me how this government shutdown is impacting healthcare.
Scott Sellinger: Well, the biggest part of it is the inability of the government to pay providers and so when the government shuts down, there's basically a two-week window where providers are not being paid for their Medicare services. So the MACs, the different MACs, there's about seven or eight of them across the country, are instructed not to pay physicians, to hold those claims. And then really after those two full weeks, really we're not sure what will happen at that point. If there's not a resolution to the shutdown, then they'll continue to hold payments. And this can have a big impact on our business because as independent providers, as you all know, we still have the bills coming in. We have to pay our staff, we have to pay for our electricity and all of our supplies. And so without the Medicare payments coming in, it can be very disruptive.
Phillip Koo: That's a great point. And I think oftentimes we forget about that and obviously patients need to be seen and timeliness is important. So the second topic that I'm learning about is there have been some changes in the telehealth policies that are really impacting healthcare practices around the country. Can you tell us more about that?
Scott Sellinger: Right. So when the government shutdown occurred as of October 1st of this year, one of the areas that went away was the telehealth benefits to our Medicare beneficiaries. Prior to that, we were allowed to proceed with audio and video telehealth conferencing with patients. And this was particularly helpful for those that had to travel long distances or perhaps were not able to even travel even short distances to come to our offices and see us. They could take advantage of the telehealth opportunities and many LUGPA practices were using these opportunities to see patients and to provide care to patients who didn't necessarily need to be actually physically seen in the offices. But now after October 1st, that all goes away. And again, that's an indefinite part of this process. We don't really know when the government comes back up and running again, what will be reinstated and what won't be reinstated. And we're hopeful that the telehealth coverage will come back and allow us to be able to continue to provide those services. But we really don't know.
Phillip Koo: That's concerning because this uncertainty around a service that is so important, especially for those underserved areas, is vital for a lot of the work that you do and the practices do. So oftentimes we look at the short term effects. I think there are clearly some longer term effects that we need to think about, and one of that is a backlog in policy type of changes. So can you tell us more about that piece?
Scott Sellinger: Sure. So as we know, CMS is responsible for rulemaking. And every year around November 1st, the final rules come out for the physician fee schedule and also the OPPS, which includes the hospital outpatient department and the ASC payment schedule. And so they haven't said that there's going to be delays, but we know that there are furloughs, there's limited staff now in many of the government regulatory offices, including CMS. And so the anticipation is is that there could be some delays, which have happened in the past. And when it does happen, usually they figure out a way to essentially shorten that time period where they have to give notice and then the rules get implemented. But hopefully we can get this whole issue resolved with the shutdown within the next two or three weeks, which will allow CMS to, in a timely fashion, at least handle the final rulemaking that we expect to see.
Phillip Koo: Thank you very much, Scott. It's obviously a very, very important topic and hopefully we see some resolution to this soon. Thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you in person in Chicago.
Scott Sellinger: Thanks, Phil. Look forward to seeing you there as well.