President's Message

• 4 million baby boomers turned 50 in 2005 - that equates to 1 every 8.5 seconds!
• As of 2005 estimates (CDC), over 43 million Americans did not have health insurance. This number grows by 12% annually.

Both houses of Congress recently passed budget legislation that will freeze Medicare physician payments at the 2005 level. This action will reverse the physician payment cut of 4.4% that went into effect on January 1, 2006.

• The AMA has laid out the prospect that the Medicare physician payment system needs to be truly reformed. If not, Medicare payment rates in 2014 will be little more than half what they were in 1991, after adjusting for practice cost inflation. Medicare payments are already lagging behind increases in practice costs.
• In 2005 the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 5, the HEALTH Act of 2005 by a vote of 230 to 194. This bill is a comprehensive set of proven reforms to bring common sense to our country’s out-of-control medical liability system. If this is not upheld, physician practices are at risk from volatile malpractice insurance rates.
• Proposals that would reduce the federal commitment to Medicaid and shift costs to states would increase the pressures that states are facing, and likely lead to additional and larger reductions in Medicaid. The end result would likely be to increase the number of low-income people in the United States who are uninsured or underinsured
  To read more: http://www.aha.org/ahapolicyforum/trendwatch/content/twapril2005medicaid.pdf.

• Conference Planning: The 7th annual conference will be June 4-7 in Orlando, Florida. This year will have a great presence from Oracle and over 100 hospitals nationwide. We hope you plan on attending. It is a great way to solve issues, network with the best of the best and of course have a great time in the process! www.hiug.org
• Webcast by Oracle: We have been working with Oracle on initiating bi-annual webcasts. These virtual town hall meetings are intended to serve as a platform for Oracle to share their product strategies for healthcare with the user community. It is also intended to be an avenue for users to ask strategy questions of Oracle. We will be e-mailing all users on the schedule of these hour-long webcasts as well as updating our hiug.com website accordingly.
• We have been pursuing an organic growth philosophy in our on-going efforts to increase the healthcare user attendees at our annual conferences. Our intent behind this growth approach is to ensure that we provide you with a wonderful opportunity to learn, network and solve your business issues. At this time, we are talking with the following groups to join our user family:

• Oracle PeopleSoft Healthcare Payers
• Oracle e-Business Suite Healthcare Payers
• Oracle e-Business Suite Healthcare Providers

• All our Pillar Leaders, Chris, John, Jason, Trudy & Bernadette for their relentless efforts to help their respective user communities
• To our conference chair, Joy for an incredible job in planning all the details of our upcoming conference
• Our Vice Chair, Bill Grimes on his efforts with sponsorships and a host of other priorities
• Our Communications Chair, Holly Howard, for all her great ideas and managing the agenda for the conference in June – it is great to have Holly back on the Board
• And finally, our treasurer Bill to keep us on track financially