Last month, U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, TX-26, accepted the Distinguished Service Award from the Texas Medical Association.
Burgess received the TMA’s highest honor for his leadership in health care throughout his career, including the last 22 years in Congress.
“I am honored to receive the Texas Medical Association’s Distinguished Service Award and I am humbled by this recognition from our nation’s largest state medical society that I have been a member of since 1981,” Burgess said. “After serving the people of Texas as a physician for over 25 years and working on health care policies in Congress for the past 22 years, I’ve learned that the health care system continues to grow and expand day by day. With new innovations of treatments and cures, I’ve dedicated my life to ensuring my state is able to access quality health care while also being cognizant of ways to lower health care costs. I am very grateful for this award and will continue putting the wellbeing of Americans first.”
Burgess had an obstetrics-gynecology practice in Lake Dallas for a quarter-century before he began serving in Congress. He chose to not seek reelection in November.
The TMA said it recognized Burgess for “shepherding health-related legislation through the lawmaking process,” including serving as a senior member of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce and chairing the committee’s Health Subcommittee. He also authored, sponsored or backed more than 27 health-related laws, including the Medicare Provide Payment Modernization Act of 2015, which repealed the Sustainable Growth Rate formula that Medicare had used to calculate physician payment, according to a TMA news release. Burgess also championed legislation to improve maternal health outcomes and contributed to the 2016 passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, which funded the National Institutes of Health and advanced biomedical research. More recently, he sponsored the Patient Access to Quality Health Care Act (House Resolution 977), which would repeal the federal ban on creating and expanding physician-owned hospitals. He also recently advocated for a more robust federal response to the Change Healthcare cyberattack and other safeguards of physician practice viability.
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