Dear Committee Leaders,
On behalf of the undersigned medical organizations, we want to thank you for your efforts to
craft a balanced, bipartisan solution to end surprise medical bills for our patients. The medical
community remains committed to working with Congress to seek a solution that protects
patients from unanticipated (“surprise”) medical bills when their insurer fails to provide them with
an adequate network of physicians. At the same time, any solution should facilitate a process to
quickly, efficiently and fairly resolve physician and health plan billing disputes.
To this end, we sincerely appreciate the continued improvements to the legislation, including the
more accessible baseball-style dispute resolution process. As you work to reconcile the
different committee approaches, we urge you to build on this structure by ensuring references
to median in-network rates are avoided, since such a benchmark would be tantamount to a
national fee schedule, thereby reducing access to in-network physicians and increasing health
care costs by driving consolidation in the health care market. We also urge you to ensure more
balanced dispute resolution guidelines that reflect commercially reasonable rates.
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