Air medical services are necessary, and DeSantis must protect them
I am an emergency and EMS physician in West Central Florida and the medical director of four AirLife and LifeNet helicopters located in North Port, Tampa, Inverness and Bartow. I write today to appeal directly to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office to humbly ask that he vetoes HB747, because it contradicts the oath that I took to protect patients. It is unethical to pass HB747, because it will put our patients at risk of losing critical health care resources.
HB747 was pushed through the Legislature unilaterally by insurers who claimed, without any supporting public health data, that air medical services are not that necessary and can easily be trimmed from Florida’s health care system — more importantly, from insurers’ own balance sheets. This simply isn’t true.
The insurers only know their balance sheet and their bottom line, not the financial realities of healthcare providers on the other side of the table. As such, they put health care providers at risk by refusing to go in-network with them in the first place.
The insurers that wrote HB747 are the same that have flatly refused to go in-network with any air medical providers. These insurers are acting against the interests of the patients we treat by deliberately putting them in the middle of an out-of-network billing process and pushing for legislation that puts the lifesaving care they need at risk.
Despite this, many air medical providers like AirLife and LifeNet have continued to work hard to show the benefits of going innetwork.
We are incredibly proud to be in-network with Florida Blue, and we see how it has directly benefited our patients by simplifying their billing process and lowering their out-of-pocket costs.
If the insurers who pushed HB747 were truly interested in protecting patients, they would go in-network with providers. Instead, HB747 allows insurers to pay air medical services — ICUlevel providers with the most specialized emergency care available today to save lives, treating everything from NICU babies to traumatic brain injury patients to acute COVID-19 patients — at arbitrary rates of the insurers’ own calculation and to exit existing in-network agreements. As we’ve seen with other government failures in health economics, the only choice providers have in these situations is to close their doors.
Additionally, HB747 is in blatant violation of federal law, and will waste time and taxpayer money when the state has to defend an unwinnable case in court for several years.
I’m a physician, not a politician, but I’m pretty sure that the medical equivalent of allowing HB747 to become law is to send a trauma patient home even though they could have internal bleeding. It’s irresponsible, it’s reckless, it wastes everyone’s time, and ends up costing more down the road than simply assessing and treating the condition at hand.
This issue doesn’t require legislation like HB747 and millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars, it can be fixed if health insurers are expected and required by government officials to cover air medical services with in-network negotiations. That’s it.