NHHA LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
March 18, 2008
The House and Senate are nearing the “crossover” deadline
of March 20th by which time all bills must be sent to the
other body. By now, a number of ill-conceived bills have
either been killed or sent to interim study. The following
are highlights from the last few weeks.
House Says Health Privacy Bill Needs More Work
Last week, the House defeated HB 1587, a bill that would
have established a new set of privacy standards that exceed
HIPAA requirements for patient information. NHHA, along with
a broad coalition of healthcare and business organizations,
opposed this bill, citing the unintended consequences that
blocking critical health information would produce. If
enacted, HB 1587 would impede progress toward statewide
adoption of electronic medical records (EMR), a priority for
Governor Lynch. While debating HB 1587, opponents pointed to
the harm this law would cause if quality of care is
jeopardized in favor of privacy. The House rejected the
committee recommendation to pass the bill, 150-166. Finally,
the House voted to return the bill to committee for ‘interim
study.’
The statewide grassroots effort to defeat this bill was a
critical component of our strategy to convince legislators
to break with leadership and vote against the bill.
Certificate of Need – Expedited Review
Senator Betsi DeVries (D, Manchester) introduced SB 541
to authorize the Health Services Planning & Review Board to
adopt rules creating an expedited review process for certain
routine projects, the cost of which exceeds the threshold.
Although NHHA believes the Board has authority to conduct
expedited reviews under the current statute, the bill simply
provides clarification. NHHA participated in numerous
meetings with the sponsor to remove provisions from an
earlier version of the bill that would have (1) exempted
urgent care centers from CON review, and (2) raised capital
thresholds to $3 million for most reviewable projects. The
Senate is expected to vote on this proposal this week, after
which it will be sent to the House.
Uninsured
The Senate passed SB 425, a bill requiring all
healthcare providers to submit “dummy” claims for uninsured
patients in order to document the utilization of unpaid
health care services, the cost of those services and the
impact on the commercial insurance market.
SB 425 is a product of a legislative study committee, led by
Senator Maggie Hassan (D,Exeter), intended to evaluate the
extent of services provided to uninsured patients.
SB 425, relative to the data collection practices of health
care providers and relative to the development of a
comprehensive uninsured health care database, requires
health care providers that bill electronically to submit
claims for uninsured patients to DHHS, and requires the
state to develop a “comprehensive uninsured health care
database.”
A complete list of bills NHHA is following is available at
www.nhha.org/nhha/state_law/bills.php.
Go to
http://www.nhha.org/nhha/state_law/bills.php to view the
list of bills NHHA is tracking.
