Action On Surprise Medical Bills

Emmarie Huetteman of WebMD has written a piece explaining President Donald Trump’s vow to take action on surprise medical bills.  Administration officials have been instructed by the president to investigate how to prevent surprise medical bills and he is broadening his focus on drug prices to include other issues of price transparency in health care.

Patients and other guests were invited to the White House to share their stories of their outrageous health bills, to work on a solution with the health secretary, Alex Azar and labor secretary Alex Acosta. The exorbitant prices are hurting patients and even though some has been stopped, it all needs to be. David Silverstein is the founder of a Colorado-based nonprofit called Broken Healthcare who also attended the meeting. He believes there’s big change coming.

The practice of charging patients for care that’s more expensive or not covered by insurance has received much attention in the past year as Kaiser Health News and other organizations have held investigations into patients’ most outrageous medical bills.  Guests included patients and doctors who were given an opportunity to talk.

Paul Davis was a retired doctor from Findlay, Ohio whose family experienced receiving a $17,850 bill for a simple urine test. His daughter Elizabeth was a college student in Texas and had spinal surgery. Following the surgery she was asked provide a urine sample and then received a bill from an out-of-network lab in Houston for a test that rarely costs more than $200. They paid their portion after insurance of $5,000 then filed a complaint with the Texas attorney general’s office of price gouging of staggering proportions. This is a high priority for Trump and they intend to do something constructive to fix this.

A proposal was unveiled to tie the price Medicare pays for some drugs to the prices paid for the same drugs overseas. The expansion of association health plans and new requirement is that hospitals post their list prices online. They have also increased the generic drug approvals to help lower drug prices. As a result the prescriptions prices were lowered for the first time in 50 years. STAT pointed out, however, that growth in relative drug prices has slowed since January 2017 and not because of an overall decrease in prices. Patents have expired on brand-name drugs and drug spending has leveled off as pharmaceutical companies have released fewer blockbuster drugs.

The House Oversight Committee announced a sweeping investigation into drug prices. They point to an AARP report saying the vast majority of brand-name drugs had more than doubled in price between 2005 and 2017.

Dr Fredda Branyon