Physician Advocacy Continues to Support Technical Fix of Unworkable Financial Consent Requirement Created in Last Year’s State Budget
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Physicians should continue to urge their legislators Revise Requirement to ask that they support a proposal, Part L, in the Executive Budget HMH bill to provide a technical fix to last year’s State Budget provision that created an unworkable requirement for physicians to receive consents from patients for payment for healthcare services only AFTER these services have been delivered. MSSNY has also indicated its support Consents for similar stand-alone legislation (A.6773, Paulin) to fix this problem.
The law has put “on hold” by the NYS Department of Health due its impracticality. Since last year, MSSNY has educated various public officials that the law is at odds with typical medical practice workflow of patient completion of paperwork. If permitted to be implemented, the likely inability to obtain this post-treatment consent from many patients will significantly increase unrecovered patient cost-sharing responsibilities, which will accelerate the closing of community medical practices.
Enactment of Part L will help to prevent this chaos by changing the timing for receiving this consent to prior to treatment, when out of pocket costs are discussed and consents are usually signed.
Some have advocated for alternative legislation to replace the general financial consent requirement with a specific “good faith estimate” to be provided to all patients, including insured patients, regarding the anticipated costs of treatment. To be clear, such estimate is already required for uninsured and self-pay patients. For insured patients, however, it would be a near-impossible task to accurately and timely provide such an estimate. Health care providers have no control over the rules a health insurance plan has for covering health care services, including patient cost-sharing responsibilities. The wide array of coverage designs for both state-regulated and self-insured plans, not to mention the uncertainties of whether and which health care services will be covered by the patient’s insurer, and health circumstances that could require additional treatment after the consent is given, makes giving such advance and accurate predicted out of pocket cost estimates to every patient extremely difficult. Similar provisions were contained within the federal No Surprises Act but never implemented due to the complexities and obstacles of expeditiously and accurately developing predictive cost information to be given to the patient.
Please urge your legislators to support including this Part L provision in the Budget. Revise Requirement
