Healthcare Law Alert: New York’s 2024-25 Budget Imposes New Requirements on Physicians and Physician Practices
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The 2024-25 New York State Budget introduces important changes that directly impact physicians and physician practices. These changes, effective October 20, 2024, address several key areas, including billing practices, patient consent, and the handling of credit card payments. Physicians and their practices must review and update their procedures to ensure compliance with these new legal requirements.
The new legislation impacts how physicians manage billing for their services. While the changes primarily target transparency of costs and patient consent, they also indirectly affect billing processes:
- Separate Consent Forms: Physicians must now separately secure the patients’ consent for treatment and consent for payment. This means that practices must create distinct forms specific to each purpose and comprehensively discuss issues related to costs with the same import as they do with clinical concerns.
This ensures that patients are fully informed about the costs of their treatment before agreeing to pay. Physicians must ensure that discussions regarding the costs of treatment occur after services. To be clear, consent for payment can only be obtained after the treatment has been provided and after the costs have been discussed with the patient. This ensures that patients ostensibly have a full understanding of the financial obligations before agreeing to pay.
The new budget also introduces specific regulations, via additions to the NYS General Business Law, regarding the use of credit cards for payment in physician practices:
- Restrictions on Pre-Authorization: Physicians are prohibited from requiring patients to preauthorize a credit card or keep one on file before delivering emergency or medically necessary services. This protects patients from unexpected charges and ensures that payment information is not collected prematurely.
- Patient Risk Notification: Physicians must inform patients about the risks associated with using credit cards to pay for medical services. This includes notifying patients that paying with a credit card may result in the loss of certain state and federal protections related to medical debt.
Conclusion
The 2024-25 New York State Budget imposes new obligations on physicians and physician practices aimed at enhancing patient protections and ensuring greater transparency in billing and payment practices. Physicians must take steps to update their consent forms, billing procedures, and credit card policies to comply with these changes by the October 20, 2024, deadline.
For further details on these requirements and how to implement them in your practice, please contact David N. Vozza, Esq. at [email protected] or call (917) 369-8867.
Editor’s Note:
These upcoming requirements have been discussed in several Pulse articles. MSSNY staff recently joined with representatives of urgent care in a meeting with the NYS Department of Health and the Governor’s office to raise concerns and urge legislative revisions to provisions adopted in the 2024-25 New York State Budget related to the collection of payments from patients.
MSSNY followed up this meeting with a detailed letter to the Health Department and the Governor’s office that further elaborated on these concerns, as well as reaching out to hospital associations with similar concerns to coordinate advocacy to 1) urge a delay on the implementation of these provisions, and 2) amendments to narrow the scope of these provisions in the 2025 Legislative Session.
Join this effort by sending a letter from the MSSNY Grassroots Action Center: Oppose Requirement to Obtain Patient Consent to Bill After Services Delivered (p2a.co)
