Carriers - health care - price transparency - rules - legislative declaration - definitions
(1) Legislative declaration. (a) The general assembly finds and declares that:
(I) The federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Pub.L. 111-148, was enacted on March 23, 2010, and the federal Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, Pub.L. 111-152, was enacted on March 30, 2010, and these acts are referred to collectively as PPACA;
(II) PPACA reorganized, amended, and added to the provisions of part A of Title XXVII of the federal Public Health Service Act, Pub.L. 78-410, relating to health coverage requirements for group health plans and health insurance issuers in the group and individual markets;
(III) Section 2715A of the federal Public Health Service Act, Pub.L. 78-410, provides that group health plans and health insurance issuers offering group or individual health insurance coverage must comply with section 1311 (e)(3) of PPACA, which addresses transparency in health coverage and imposes certain reporting and disclosure requirements for health plans;
(IV) Effective January 11, 2021, the federal centers for medicare and medicaid services, or CMS, published the final rule to implement PPACA, codified at 45 CFR 147.210 to 147.212;
(V) In its summary of the final rule, CMS states that requiring plans to disclose in-network provider rates, historical out-of-network allowed amounts and the associated billed charges, and negotiated rates for prescription drugs can help ensure the accurate and timely disclosure of information appropriate to support an efficient and competitive health care market; and
(VI) As former United States President Donald Trump's Executive Order on Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First explains: To make fully informed decisions about their healthcare, patients must know the price and quality of a good or service in advance. Additionally, the executive order then notes that patients often lack both access to useful price and quality information and the incentives to find low-cost, high-quality care. The lack of this information is widely understood to be one of the root problems causing dysfunction within the United States' health-care system.