Trending
By John Finnerty
Capitolwire.com
HARRISBURG -- The House Health Committee on Wednesday effectively killed an effort to create a medical debt relief program. The committee replaced the debt relief provisions in House Bill 79 with language intended to get hospitals to do a better job of promoting their existing financial assistance and charity programs.
The House had approved a medical debt relief bill last session but the measure died in the Senate.
Under new language in HB 79, hospitals would not be required to start or change their charity program eligibility requirements, but proponents say the legislation would make it simpler for patients to understand existing programs. The committee voted unanimously to approve the bill and advance it to the full House.
Health Committee Minority Chairwoman state Rep. Kathy Rapp, R-Venango, called the changes a "common sense approach" to helping patients deal with medical bills.
The bill HB 79 originally called for debt relief for patients who either live in households with income at or below 400% of the federal poverty line or have medical debt exceeding 5% of their household income. After the committee meeting, the bill's prime sponsor state Rep. Arvind Venkat, D-Allegheny, told Capitolwire that the medical debt plan had run into headwinds and that the alterations are intended to find another way to tackle the problem.
"This is definitely not a defeat," he said. "This is a way to get at the root cause" of medical debt by making it more likely that patients get financial assistance if they qualify for it.
Rather than helping thousands of people with medical debt, the revised legislation could help millions of people access assistance programs, he said.
Even so, he acknowledged that the medical debt relief program had faced resistance due to the potential price tag. The medical debt relief proposal would also have hit hurdles when it came to trying to get hospitals to cooperate with the debt relief program, he said.
An effort to establish a medical debt relief program in Pittsburgh lost momentum when the two main health systems in the city -- the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Allegheny Health Network - refused to cooperate. Under the Pittsburgh plan, the debt would have been purchased from the health systems by a nonprofit, which would then have forgiven the debt. But the two Pittsburgh health systems have policies in place barring them from selling debt to third parties.
The statewide proposal would have depended on a similar approach. The Department of Health would have contracted with a third party, which would have used state funding to purchase medical debt from hospitals and then forgive the debt.
Medical debt is typically sold for pennies on the dollar. State officials had estimated that the state program could have canceled $400 million in medical debt at a cost of $4 million to the state. Officials estimate that about 1 million residents have medical debt. As of December 2020, residents had more than $1.8 billion in overdue medical bills.