Virginia's Labor and Commerce Subcommittee #1 advanced a dozen insurance and health care bills — including contraceptive equity, donor breast milk coverage, white bagging restrictions, and a new annuity product — while tabling an ambulance surprise-billing bill after sharp disagreement over a 350% Medicare payment floor, and receiving an urgent federal briefing on proposed CMS changes that could expose Virginia to new cost-defraying obligations.
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Doug Gray (Virginia Association of Health Plans) argued the 350% Medicare floor would undermine existing in-network arrangements and impose significant costs, and that egregious balance billing is primarily attributable to a single company (AMR) doing hospital-to-hospital transfers — not the emergency scenario the bill addresses. Senator Perry countered that her constituent's case was not the AMR/hospital-transfer scenario Gray described and that the cost-sharing provision is essential consumer protection she would not remove, making HERC review unavoidable. Delegate Sullivan argued the bill should be carried over to next session for a negotiated solution rather than sent to HERC.
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“What CMS is proposing now is that just because you have it in your benchmark plan, if you left it on your code books, you didn't take it out when you put it in the benchmark plan, or you had some subsequent piece of legislation that came through and restated or reiterated what that mandate was, they are not going to treat that mandate as being in the benchmark plan. They're going to treat it as in addition to the benchmark plan and therefore requiring defrail.”
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Sign in to subscribeEveryone, let's go ahead and open the board so we can place our attendance report our attendance. Okay, we have. We have a quorum. Thank you very much, Mr. Clerk. All right, we have just a minute. We'll start off with an administrative item. We are going to take by for the day, SB734. I believe that's a voice vote. All in favor say Aye. Any opposed? All right, we will. The ayes have it. We will pass by for the day, SB734. That will be back before us on Tuesday of next week. Okay, we're going to start. We're going to go a little bit out of order for a couple of things just as a precursor for the agenda today. A couple people still need to get to other committee meetings and other commitments. So you'll see some things come out of. Out of order. Also, for bills where we have people speaking, please know we're going to try to be tight, but also give enough time for people to speak. But just know that we wanna be respectful of everybody to have time. So when we place the clock, the timer on, please be respectful of not…
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