NHHA LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
April 16, 2008
Data collection on the uninsured and Certificate of Need took front stage this past week in the House Health & Human Services Committee. More work is expected on these two bills as subcommittees spend their time clarifying legislative intent.
Data on the Uninsured
|SB 425, requiring healthcare providers to submit dummy claims for uninsured
patients, is under review by the House HHS Committee. The bill’s proponents
intend to develop a companion data base to the Comprehensive Health Information
System to document utilization and cost of health care services by the
uninsured.
The Insurance Department has fashioned an amendment to the bill requiring all healthcare providers to submit their data, but provides a one-year exemption for healthcare providers that can demonstrate that data reporting would impose an undue economic burden, adversely impact the provider’s ability to serve its patients, or cause the provider to reduce the amount of health care services delivered.
The amendment includes a phase-in of the reporting starting with hospitals
submitting their data within 6 months, and all other health care providers
required to begin submitting claims data within 18 months of the effective date
of the data collection rules.
A future revision will permanently exempt long term care providers.
NHHA questioned the usefulness of one year’s worth of hospital-only data when the purpose of the bill is to document services provided by all types of providers. The response was that hospitals are “best organized economically to handle this requirement.
The Insurance Department estimates the cost to providers to be approximately $500,000 (100,000 uninsured patients x 5 claims per year per patient x $.94/claim).
While NHHA supports the intent of the bill, other means to collect the data
ought to be explored.
Certificate of Need – Expedited Review
The Senate passed SB 541 which authorizes the CON Board to adopt rules
creating an expedited review process for routine projects, the cost of which
exceeds the threshold. In the hearing before the House HHS Committee last week,
the bill elicited from legislators a number of unrelated CON topics including
the number and cost of hospital projects approved over the past five years,
quality as it relates to capital expenditures, and a desire to reconvene the CON
Task Force that last met in 2002. Subcommittee work sessions on the bill are
expected to begin next week.
Small Business Health Insurance
A hearing on Governor Lynch’s wellness insurance proposal, HealthFirst, held
last week. SB 540 would require insurance companies to offer to small employers
a standard wellness plan priced at no more than 10 percent of the median
statewide wage. The bill’s supporters testified that the focus on wellness care
will reduce employers’ health insurance premiums by as much as 15 percent.
Under a standard wellness plan, employees would be required to take more responsibility for their health through participation in wellness programs and disease management programs. In return, employees would likely see their co-pays and deductibles lowered. Health plans expressed concern that once wellness plans are designed, the cost could exceed the 10 percent price cap. Concerns were expressed that this could result in a shifting of costs to other healthcare policies.
A complete list of bills NHHA is following is available at www.nhha.org/nhha/state_law/bills.php. Go to http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/bill_status/ to view the list of bills NHHA is tracking.
