Legislative Updates
NYSPMA Legislative Update - 2024
Dr. Karen Langone, Chair, Dr. E. Giannin Perez, Assistant Chair, Dr. Jackie Prevete, Assistant Chair
This year the Legislative Affairs Committee met on a monthly basis and had one main goal: to advance a new modernized scope bill that allowed for increased access to care for skin and soft tissue pathology extending to the level of the tibial tuberosity. Additionally, this scope bill will allow for adjustments for the level of training that graduating residents now obtain and will also help to alleviate roadblocks associated with board qualification/certification status as it relates to surgical privileges. Much of this year’s work was centered around the promotion of this bill and modifying things when necessary without sacrificing our goal to practice to the fullest extent of our scope. Our Lobby Day occurred on 5/7/24 and involved a small group with an overall positive response.
Additional work of this committee this year included the prevention of any “scope creep” with nurses providing at-risk foot care. While this is technically out of the scope for an RN in NYS, efforts were made to ensure that this was indeed the case and that no infringement on our specialty could occur by those without our level of training.
Two bills that were recently brought to our attention will require continued follow-up. One is S7076 / A7590 which limits look back for insurance overpayment to 3 months (currently 2 years). The 2nd bill (no number assigned yet) deals with credit card payments to practitioners. Usually, there is a cost to this that the provider has to pay. This bill will allow the provider to decide how reimbursement is paid (other than the credit card which includes fees). Both of the above bills will be investigated once more information becomes available.
The future goals of this committee going forward would be to follow up on the progression of our scope bill. After our lobby day occurred this year, the Assembly decided to allow for only the pathway portion of our bill to be passed forward. Our three main goals for our scope bill were the following: 1) the ability for ALL podiatrists to treat skin and soft tissue to the level of the tibial tuberosity, 2) to rectify the pathway issue for surgical podiatrists pursuing ankle licensure through NYS, allowing board qualified individuals to apply for this licensure, and 3) to prevent any procedures to be named within our bill, which would exclude us from being able to perform these procedures. Your NYSPMA Board of Trustees decided as a unit that without all three of these things present, the bill would NOT move forward at any point.
The option to pass ONLY the pathway portion of these three items through the Assembly was offered to us, and this was turned down. The reason that this was rejected is that any one portion of the three items listed above does not serve the profession as a whole. Our goal is to allow for this scope modernization to advance everyone to some degree - not just a select number of NYS podiatrists. Therefore, it was decided that we would wait until all three facets of this modernized scope can be accommodated prior to passing any legislation. If only a portion passes, history has it that we may not get another chance again for another 10 years. We decided on this all-or-nothing approach in the best interest of the profession as a whole.
