Amendments due on state health care finance bill
Lawmakers have until tomorrow to file amendments to a health care finance bill seeking to raise $450 million in new fees on hospitals, insurers, urgent care clinics, and add protections against out-of-network billing and other measures.
The 127-page bill is now before the House Ways and Means Committee after it was endorsed by the Health Care Finance Committee.
“It’s a very, very complicated bill,” said Ipswich Republican Rep. Brad Hill, speaking on the floor yesterday. Hill said the House would take up the bill next week and asked his colleagues to reject the order setting the deadline on amendments.
Hill said he did not think two days was enough time to read the bill and offer amendments to improve it.
“Although this bill has been around the legislative process for quite some time, for those of us who aren’t involved in insurance, aren’t involved in medical stuff, this is a bill that we believe, I believe, needs further addressing,” Hill said.
The bill has been in development for months and serves as a counterproposal from House leaders to the health care bill approved by the Senate in November.
The bill calls for a total of $450 million in one-time assessments charged on commercial insurers and acute hospitals that had more than $750 million in total net assets in fiscal year 2017 and less than 60 percent of its patients are on Medicaid. The insurers would be hit up for $330 million total, with the hospitals making up the remaining $120 million.
That money would be deposited into a state-run trust fund controlled by the secretary of health and human services and would be used to boost the bottom lines of acute care hospitals whose relative prices for delivered care are below 90 percent of the statewide median relative price.
“This legislation has been carefully crafted to consider the variety of stakeholders who have shared their priorities with this committee,” Rep. Jeffrey Roy, the committee’s vice chairman, said in a statement. “However, this bill is ultimately shaped around improving the experience for consumers and working towards addressing the growing cost burden of healthcare on the Commonwealth.”
The secretary is directed under the bill to give the largest payments to the hospitals with the lowest relative prices and to consider Medicaid volume when determining a payment. In a statement, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo said the committee’s application of the assessments “does not single out any one entity or industry segment and strengthens our community health centers.”