Treadmill

rest breaks eventually improves the distances people can walk pain-free.

A simple test of ankle and arm blood pressure in any doctor’s office can detect the condition. Beginning in January, Medicare will pay for 12 weeks of supervised exercise at $53 apiece with a doctor’s referral. Sessions will be about

three times a week for 30 minutes to an hour.

“Right now I tell all my patients with peripheral artery disease to walk. But it’s really hard for them,” said Dr. Mary McDermott of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Without someone checking on them and encouraging them, many patients won’t keep at it, she said.

Leg pain forced Chicago resident Zella Coleman to give up bowling and trips

with her choir. After four months of supervised treadmill walking in a Northwestern program at a gym, her pain has eased enough that she’s started walking with friends in her neighborhood.

“I’m trying to get well so I can get back to my life,” said the 63-year-old.

The American Heart Association and other heart specialists came together to ask Medicare to cover supervised exercise therapy for people with artery disease. The government’s

leading insurance program occasionally reviews the value of treatments and decides what to cover.

Over the past two decades, Medicare officials have been finding ways for the program to cover things like counseling to help people stop smoking or to lose weight. Medicare already pays for supervised exercise for people recovering from heart attacks.

“Now we don’t have to wait for them to have a heart attack,” said Dr. Elizabeth

Ratchford of the Johns Hopkins Center for Vascular Medicine in Baltimore.

The decision resulted from medical specialty groups uniting behind a low-tech intervention, said Dr. Louis Jacques, who oversaw Medicare coverage recommendations for five years until 2014.

“From the patient’s point of view, nobody is cutting you open, you’re not getting anesthesia, you’re not getting hospitalized,” said Jacques of the health care

consulting firm ADVI.

Patients need to keep walking or the pain will return.

Driscoll is committed, walking several times a week at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.

The 69-year-old doesn’t want to end up like her grandmother who “couldn’t walk down the sidewalk without having to rest.”

“My grandma was an old lady, but at the same age I’m not,” Driscoll said. “This grandma still dances.”