Congress Considers Bipartisan Compromise Legislation On Surprise Medical Bills – By Rachel Bluth (Kaiser Health Network) / Dec 17 2019
After months of hearings and negotiations, millions of dollars in attack ads, full-court-press lobbying efforts and countless rounds of negotiations, Congress appears to be moving toward a solution to the nation’s surprise medical bill problem. Sort of.
Surprise bills, the often-exorbitant medical bills that come when patients don’t realize they’ve been seen by a provider outside their insurance network, have in recent months been viewed as public enemy No. 1 on Capitol Hill.
Two committees, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, have been working on plans and announced a compromise Dec. 8. Later that week, the House Ways and Means Committee followed suit by announcing its solution, though details are few.
It’s been a heavy lift for lawmakers in both parties who are trying to balance the competing needs of powerful stakeholders, factions within their ranks and consumers stuck with high bills. With an election year fast approaching and polls consistently showing health care costs a high priority for voters, the push for action has intensified.
Time is not of the essence
Despite the rushed way some committee members announced the agreement Dec. 8 — issuing a press release on a Sunday before any official bill text was released — it’s now looking unlikely that Congress will consider the package before it wraps up work for the year.
HELP Committee Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., signaled as much in a Dec. 16 press release in which he promised to do everything he could to keep the surprise medical bill issue at the top of the congressional to-do list for 2020.
“The only people who don’t want this fixed are the people who benefit from these excessive fees,” he said.
Still, the recent signs of progress are significant, even if final passage happens next year, says Loren Adler, the associate director of USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, a research group.
Even if Congress punts it to February or March, “there’s a decent shot of getting it done,” Adler says. “It would be pretty darn embarrassing if Congress doesn’t pass it after talking about it this long and it being such an egregious problem.”
Continue to article: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/17/788624397/congress-considers-bipartisan-compromise-legislation-on-surprise-medical-bills
