New Bill, Big Potential Impact
New healthcare legislation was introduced in the Senate that could have a huge financial impact on your facility. The new healthcare legislation aims at communications from healthcare providers to patients about medical debt owed as well as transparency about medical debt practices.
What’s in the Bill
United States Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) sponsored the Strengthening Consumer Protections and Medical Debt Transparency Act which seeks to add several requirements to debt collection, including:
- Before sending a medical debt into collections, healthcare providers should ensure that all insurance coverage appeals have been exhausted and determine if a patient qualifies for financial assistance.
- Healthcare providers, or their collection agencies, must wait 180 days after the initial bill is sent and the patient’s identity has been verified before entering into extraordinary collection efforts.
- Itemized statements of medical debts owed, as well as detailed receipts of payments made, must be provided from the healthcare provider to the patients within 30 days. Information about language assistance services for individuals with limited English proficiency must also be provided.
They are also directing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create a publicly available database of annual reporting from hospitals, freestanding facilities and large provider practices with information about whether they use collection agents, their process for assigning debt to a collection agent and the number of extraordinary collection actions – as defined by the IRS – they have initiated. HHS will also maintain a public list of any health care entity that does not submit the required information each year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is also to issue a biennial report on medical debt and review the public database for its application to the CFPB’s risk supervision program.
Where this healthcare legislation has the potential to drastically impact your bottom line is the following statement:
A healthcare entity, or its agent, who fails to comply with changes under the Act is liable to the patient for actual damages up to $1,000. In the case of a class action suit, damages are the amount each plaintiff could have recovered, not to exceed $2 million. If the patient is successful, then attorney’s fees and other costs also can be recovered.
The Real Cost
The above portion of the legislation puts a very real – and very costly – dollar amount on not only noncompliance, but also on what could be an innocent mistake. This medical debt legislation has the potential to dramatically impact the care you provide your patients. This situation demands attention because it may not only affect how you recover your past due payments but cost you even more in the end.
Conclusion
As we enter the next presidential election cycle, you can expect more and more healthcare legislation to be introduced around medical debt. Americollect continues to monitor these announcements and share them with you when they have the potential to impact your facility.
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