Health-care interests, using TV ads that hide who’s paying for the air time, fight legislation to limit surprise or ‘balance’ billing
This ad claims the bill would help insurance firms and hurt patients.
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Unknown people and businesses are giving millions of dollars to kill legislation nearing passage in Congress that would protect consumers from surprise medical bills. That’s who’s paying for those ads you’re seeing on television. They’re called “dark money” groups because they don’t reveal their contributors.
“Pity the poor consumer trying to understand the coming congressional debate,” writes journalist Trudy Lieberman, who considers patients’ point of view. She says surprise bills have heaped “staggering amounts of debt … on unsuspecting patients after they believed insurance had paid for their care. Those bills are growing rapidly and ensnaring more and more Americans in what has become one of the medical industry’s most unsavory business practices.”
Lieberman notes a study just published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine: “The number of surprise bills for both ER and inpatient admissions are rising. In 2010, about 32% of all ER visits resulted in surprise bills. In 2016, nearly 43% did. Surprise bills for inpatient admissions jumped from about 26% to 42% over the same period. What’s more, the average amount billed to patients for ER visits nearly tripled and the cost for inpatient admissions more than doubled.”
With the TV ads, “the special interests that benefit from socking patients with additional bills” are trying “to convince consumers that any congressional efforts this fall to correct the surprise billing problem may actually harm patients,” Lieberman writes. Noting the “Harry and Louise” ads that helped kill the Clinton health-care plan in 1994, she says “This kind of advertising works.”
Lieberman says the industry is fighting hard because it fears “any kind of cost containment . . . something sorely needed, and bitterly fought for decades by the medical businesses whose incomes are at stake.”
Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy at the National Business Group on Health, told Lieberman, “I believe that the investor-driven physician staffing firms fear that if our preferences become law, their business model — go out of network and raise prices — is shot.” He added, “Everyone agrees on banning balance billing. The disagreement is over payment rates and processes for determining payment for out-of-network physicians.”