Rep. Mike Winder argues that medical providers shouldn’t have an unlimited amount of time to bill their patients — something he began considering after a conversation with a constituent last year.
A man called him, Winder said, complaining that he’d recently gotten slapped with a medical bill more than 12 months after his treatment.
“I thought it was all paid off, and I was healed physically and financially,” the West Valley City Republican recalled the man telling him. “But then this bill falls on my lap that I see for the very first time a year after it was done. Shouldn’t there be something in the law that prevents somebody from getting a bill so far in the future?”
Winder thought the man was onto something. So on Tuesday, he presented legislation that would give medical providers a deadline of 120 days to send out health care bills to insurance companies or patients.
Some representatives on the floor saw the proposal, HB116, as a common sense transparency measure that would benefit patients. But for Rep. Norm Thurston, the bill goes against the concept that “if you owe somebody money, you owe them money.”
“In fact, you should be glad if somebody doesn’t ask you for the money right away,” the Provo Republican said. “You just got an interest-free loan.”
Following the debate, the legislation passed by a vote of 48 to 24.
Thurston, who leads a nonprofit that focuses on health care data, also contended that insurance companies and hospitals largely seem able to handle medical billing on their own, without the need for government intervention.
“The reason why we have never regulated this before is because the private sector seems to be working,” he said. “Those contracts between the health insurance companies and the hospitals and the doctors and health systems seem to be working, very generally.”
Rep. Ray Ward, on the other hand, argued that the patient’s voice is often absent from these conversations between insurance carriers and providers — and said the health care system’s opacity is another barrier for individuals who are trying to figure out what they owe.
“There does not exist a person for most hospital bills who knows both what happened and what was billed,” said Ward, who is a family physician. “There’s a person at the hospital you can call, and it will be their job to speak politely to you, and they’re very good at that. But they don’t know what was done or what the bill was for.”
Ward, R-Bountiful, said requiring providers to send bills in a timely manner is a sensible minimum standard.
Other lawmakers who support the proposal spoke about receiving bills after their deductible had reset for the new year — which forced them to pay out-of-pocket for medical costs that insurance would’ve covered if there hadn’t been a delay.
Legislators also discussed concerns about people whose medical care stretches on for months and whether Winder’s bill would require providers to begin charging them while they’re still hospitalized or receiving treatment. Winder said his legislation avoids this problem by stipulating that the 120-day billing clock would only start when the patient’s service or procedure is completed.
Now that the bill has cleared the House, it will head to the Senate for consideration.
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