Optometric Equity in Medicaid Act of 2009 (HR 2697)

Healthy eyes and clear vision are important for children to learn, adults to work and seniors to maintain their personal health, quality and longevity of life. That’s why safeguarding vision, particularly in medically underserved areas, remains an urgent health care policy challenge:

 

• About 25% of school-age children suffer from undiagnosed vision problems, the most prevalent   disabling condition in childhood.

• Vision disability is one of the top 10 disabilities among adults age 18 years and older.

In California, as of July 1st, Medicaid patients will no longer be able to see an optometrist for the treatment of an eye disease, like glaucoma, or an eye infection, leaving them to struggle to find adequate care.  With other states considering similar proposals to restrict patient access, Congress can and should take action to ensure that Medicaid patients who rely on an optometrist to provide their medical eye care will not be discriminated against:

 

Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Ralph Hall (R-TX) have introduced the Optometric Equity in Medicaid Act (HR 2697), a bi-partisan bill to provide a timely and common-sense update to the Federal Medicaid statute by applying to it the Medicare definition of optometrists as physicians that Congress enacted in 1986.

 

Doctors of Optometry (ODs), defined as physicians under Medicare, are the nation’s frontline providers of eye and vision care, and the most accessible providers of vision and medical eye care services to Medicaid patients. Optometrists are eye care professionals who diagnose, treat and manage diseases, injuries and disorders of the eye, surrounding tissues and visual system.

 

There are more than 50,000 optometrists providing care for tens of millions of patients across the country, and in more than 3,500 communities ODs are the only eye doctors. In addition to providing eye and vision care as part of a primary care teams, optometrists play a major role in a patient’s overall health and well-being by detecting and helping prevent complications of systemic diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, neurologic disease and diabetes, the leading cause of acquired blindness.

 

The Medicare program’s longstanding recognition of optometrists as physicians assures Medicare patients of access to optometrists providing care in their community. In the absence of similar statutory language in Medicaid, optometric care is particularly vulnerable to proposals advancing in several states that seek to impose cuts or access restrictions on Medicaid coverage that’s deemed “optional.” As a result, Medicaid patients – including school-aged children, uninsured working men and women and seniors – could be cut off from an eye doctor in their community or blocked from seeking the treatment they need for an eye infection or eye disease from a local optometrist.