Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif. (Photo: House Ways and Means)
A House Ways and Means health subcommittee hearing held Tuesday highlighted a problem that could challenge any life, health or annuity groups trying to get legislation through Congress: Many House Democrats are hazy on how insurers see things.
The subcommittee organized the hearing to address the "balance billing," or "surprise medical bill" issue: Cases of patients who end up with big medical bills because they used emergency care out of network, or who received ordinary care at in-patient hospitals and discovered later, to their horror, that some of the providers involved were out of network.
The House Ways and Means subcommittee chair, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, is trying to round up support for H.R. 861, a bill that would require any hospital seeking to participate in Medicare to provide any out-of-network insured patients, whether the patients were covered by Medicare or by other health insurance programs, with detailed out-of-network cost notices.
The notices would have to warn the patients about the likelihood that they would be getting care out of network, and explaining what kinds of bills they might end up having to pay.
A hospital that wanted to be part of Medicare and failed to provide a balance billing warning notice could bill an insured patient only for the cost-sharing amount the patient would have owed if the care had been provided by an in-network provider.
If a hospital in the Medicare program provided emergency care to an insured patient outside of the patient's health plan network, the hospital could bill the patient only for the patient's usual in-network cost-sharing amounts.
"The sole focus of the bill is to protect insured patients from being trapped between an insurer and an out-of-network provider," Doggett said at the hearing, which was streamed live on the web.
States are taking action, but federal action is also necessary, because about 40% of patients in Texas, for example, are in group health plans that fall under the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) state health benefits preemption rules, and state laws and regulations have no effect on ERISA plans' out-of-network coverage, Doggett said.
Here are three takeaways for agents and brokers from the hearing.
1. Lawmakers see control over health care providers' ability to participate Medicare as a great motivator.
Doggett is not trying to have the federal government impose balance billing restrictions or notice requirements directly, and it's possible that the federal government may have no authority under the U.S. Constitution to do so. But Congress does appear to have the ability to decide which organizations can participate in Medicare.
Providers' eagerness to participate in Medicare could have a bearing on how Medicare for All or other health finance system change proposals fare.
