Regulating Surprise Bills Lower Healthcare Prices – Guess How Much

You wake up in the post-operative recovery area, still groggy, the full effects of the procedure obscured by an anesthetic haze. You begin to ponder several questions: Was the surgery a success? Did the surgeon find anything unexpected? How quickly will the procedure make you feel better?

There’s another question you might ask yourself. A few weeks from now, is anyone involved in your care going to send you a surprise bill?

If so, it will be it will probably be for the cost of an anesthesiologist assisting in the procedure, a person you barely met and who didn’t bother to mention that they are not listed as an “in-network” provider. You are now on the hook for the price of their services, another victim of surprise billing.

No one should ever receive such a surprise. Fortunately, a Federal law called “the No Surprises Act” banned this practice, a ban that took place early in 2022.

According to a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, this legislation is probably saving patients a lot of money. A research team led by Ambar La Forgia, a business professor at Berkeley, found significant reductions in the prices paid to out-of-network anesthesiologists in states that banned surprise billing before the federal legislation came into effect.

Consider this picture, of prices in Florida before and after that state’s surprise bill law (which, I guess, started off as a surprise bill bill and which, if no one expected the legislation, would have been a surprise surprise bill bill J). Compared to other states without such a law, Florida experienced a reduction in prices, one that was still going strong a year and a half after the law went into effect:

We have a huge price problem in the US healthcare system. One part of this problem is the existence of surprise bills. Glad to see that legislation banning this practice will chip away at the high cost of American medical care.