- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022 - Contact:
Sara Matthews
(281) 650-2961
SMatthews@MessagePartnersPR.com
PHYSICIAN GROUPS SUPPORT AMA/AHA LAWSUIT TO STOP REGULATORS’ UNFAIR NO SURPRISES ACT DISPUTE RESOLUTION APPROACH
A broad coalition of physician organizations, led by the Physicians Advocacy Institute (PAI), American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS), and joined by seven national medical societies and 16 state medical associations, filed an amicus curiae brief supporting the American Medical Association (AMA) and American Hospital Association’s (AHA) lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging federal regulators’ approach to dispute resolution under the No Surprises Act. Neither the amicus brief, nor the lawsuit which it supports, would change the No Surprises Act’s critical patient protections, which physicians strongly support.
“Physicians have an obligation to reinforce for the court just how far federal regulators walked away from the No Surprises Act’s balanced approach to resolving payment disputes and explain how bypassing the law will unfairly empower insurers at the expense of patients and their physicians,” said Dustin Corcoran, president of PAI and chief executive officer of the California Medical Association. “If the court allows this damaging example of regulatory overreach to stand, patients and physicians will pay the price.”
The statutory language of the No Surprises Act established a balanced process to resolve payment disputes between physicians and insurers for certain unanticipated out-of-network medical bills fairly, using a number of different criteria. Instead, federal regulators issued a rule that effectively upends the law, giving insurers an unfair advantage by relying almost exclusively on one factor, the insurers’ selfdetermined median in-network billing rate, to resolve billing disputes instead of considering the multitude of factors called for under the law.
