How to prevent surprise medical billing from out-of-network health care providers will be on the docket for Oklahoma lawmakers during this year’s legislative session.
The issue was taken up during the 2019 session and negotiations about surprise billing between the Legislature, the Oklahoma Insurance Department, health care providers, and health insurers occurred in earnest but no consensus was reached.
However, discussions on how to eliminate surprise medical billing in Oklahoma are continuing, according to State Reps. Marcus McEntire (R-Duncan), Chris Sneed (R-Muskogee) and Tammy Townley (R-Ardmore).
A surprise medical bill is a bill an out-of-network health provider issues to a covered insured person for health care services in an amount greater than the patient’s cost-sharing obligation that would apply for the same services by an in-network provider. What makes these bills surprising is the patient has no knowledge the provider rendering his or her health care services is out of the patient’s network.
“After the last session, we were discouraged about the pace of the surprise billing negotiations,” McEntire said in a House media release. “However, we are extremely pleased with the pace of negotiations over the interim. We are happy to announce an agreement with health providers and insurance companies to hold enrollees harmless to surprise bills and prohibit the practice of surprise billing. Both the insurance companies and health providers emphatically stated in our meeting that patients should be held harmless.”
McEntire added: “We intend to run a bill prohibiting surprise billing during the early part of the upcoming session, but there is still hard work and tough decisions ahead. The difficult challenge is to find an agreed-to method for insurance companies to compensate out-of-network providers. We have encouraged health care providers and insurance companies to negotiate a fair system of compensation or a mediation process and bring it to us. We want to see a payment system on which both sides can agree and a system that does not cause insurance premiums or the cost of health care to rise more than it already is.”
Source: Oklahoma House of Representatives
Topics Oklahoma
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