Authors
Paul B. Ginsburg
Director - USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy
Leonard D. Schaeffer Chair in Health Policy Studies
Senior Fellow - Economic Studies
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce recently requested comments from health policy experts at the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy on a new discussion draft for the No Surprises Act, to address surprise medical billing.
The experts list several ways in which the discussion draft makes an important step in protecting patients, including: addressing the market failure at the heart of surprise billing; appropriately using notice and consent exceptions; and establishing a minimum insurer payment that would likely avoid increasing health care spending relative to the status quo.
However, they also cite a few concerns and areas in which the draft could be improved. They note that the minimum insurer payment established under the draft is too high and locks in a substantial fraction of today’s unnecessary spending. Calculating the median in-network rate used to determine the minimum payment using issuer-specific data would create opportunities for gaming that could lead to unpredictable and unintended results, while potentially also creating an unlevel playing field across insurance plans. And finally, they suggest expanding the draft’s protections to encompass a slightly broader set of clinicians and services. Read the experts’ full letter to the Committee here.
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