WASHINGTON—The College of American Pathologists (CAP) welcomed the release of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Consumer Protections Against Surprise Medical Bills Act of 2020. The CAP is supportive of the Ways and Means Committee’s proposal because it protects patients from surprise bills and offers an arbitration process for resolving disputes without an artificial threshold to trigger access to the process. The CAP released the following statement about the bill:
“The House Ways and Means Committee proposal strikes the right approach with commonsense measures to protect patients and the financial viability of the health care delivery system. The legislative solution takes necessary steps toward accomplishing the CAP’s goals of holding patients financially harmless from surprise medical bills while creating a reimbursement system that keeps patients out of the middle of billing disputes. We thank Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal and Ranking Member Kevin Brady for listening to the concerns of patients and physicians from across the country on this issue. We look forward to engaging with the full committee on the proposal going forward.
“Other legislative proposals introduced and debated by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee, House Energy and Commerce Committee and, more recently, the House Education and Labor Committee favor insurance companies and fall well short of taking a balanced approach to eliminating surprise medical bills. The proposals rely on rate-setting based on median in-network rates that remove any incentive for insurers to negotiate in good faith and may lead to even narrower insurer networks of physicians.”
About the College of American Pathologists
As the world’s largest organization of board-certified pathologists and leading provider of laboratory accreditation and proficiency testing programs, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) serves patients, pathologists, and the public by fostering and advocating excellence in the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine worldwide. As a 501(c)(6) membership organization, the CAP is the only entity representing pathologists with unrestricted advocacy capability and a political action committee, PathPAC. For more information, visit yourpathologist.org to watch pathologists at work and see the stories of the patients who trust them with their care. Read the CAP Annual Report at cap.org.