WASHINGTON, June 21, 2023 – The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) and a growing coalition of more than 35 national, regional, state and local employer and health care groups today sent a letter to Members of Congress urging co-sponsorship and advancement of the Facilitating Accountability in Reimbursement (FAIR) Act (H.R. 3417) and the Site-based Invoicing and Transparency Enhancement (SITE) Act (S.1869). Together, these bipartisan efforts would protect patients, families, employers, and taxpayers from hospital dishonest billing – when hospitals secretly reclassify a doctor’s office they own as a hospital setting in order to charge more money.
“Dishonest billing gives hospital systems a financial incentive to take over independent doctor’s offices and overcharge Medicare, commercial plans and employers billions of dollars by billing non-hospital-based services as if they were delivered in a hospital,” said ERIC President and CEO James Gelfand. “This results in higher out-of-pocket costs to patients and increases the costs of healthcare, making health care unaffordable for seniors, working families, and employers, and threatening the sustainability of commercial and employer-sponsored coverage. ERIC and our partners implore Congress to advance this commonsense, important legislation, and put an end to hospital-clinician consolidation, which decreases competition and makes health care services unaffordable for millions of Americans.”
The text of the letter can be found here.