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The Coalition Against Rate Setting (CARS) has appealed to legislators to reject what they call bureaucratic price controls, after Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said they would be willing to add rate setting into the next relief bill, to “fix” surprise medical billing.
CARS urged legislators to keep the next relief bill clean, and its member organizations, which include the American Association for Senior Citizens and the Center for Individual Freedom, are in agreement: price setting is not appropriate in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. They say there are other ways to handle pricing of out-of-network care.
Government benchmarking of hospital and physician fees equates to price controls, the groups argue. The federal government could establish arbitrarily low rates for doctors providing out-of-network care by insisting these payments reflect insurers greatly discounted in-network average. The losses that physicians and hospitals experience as a result of benchmarking would be passed onto community hospitals and emergency departments, financially depressing these facilities, particularly in rural areas where there is very little room between profitability and liability,” said Bob Carlstom, president of AMAC Action.
Surprise medical billing is the name for what happens when a patient going to an in-network hospital or medical facility to receive treatment and then is hit with a large bill after discharge for care given by an out-of-network medical service provider.
“The facts are clear; government rate setting or price controls never work as intended and invariably lead to shortages and less innovation," said Jeff Mazzella, president of the Center for Individual Freedom. "Amid the current coronavirus pandemic, now is the worst possible time to mandate a counterproductive rate-setting scheme that would most harm the vital health care professionals on the front lines of this fight.”
Instead of setting price controls, members of the organization believe it would be better, especially now, to handle the problem of surprise billing differently. This, says Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs for FreedomWorks, is the time to let the markets work for the health care of all Americans.
Jessica Anderson, executive director for Heritage Action, calls for creative free-market solutions “not based on a complex, harmful government scheme of rate-setting.”
CARS is an organization dedicated to fighting for a health care system where patients choose their doctors and treatments. It’s website notes that part of their mission is to work together to “educate policymakers and the public on the importance of markets in medicine free of federal fiat.”
Learn more about CARS and it’s goals at noratesetting.org.
