The requirement to give patients “good-faith estimates” of the costs associated with planned medical procedures will pose one of the biggest challenges to providers seeking to meet the implementation requirements of the 2020 No Surprises Act, which was intended to protect consumers from surprise medical bills, especially from providers not in their health insurers’ provider networks.
Under the law’s implementing regulations, providers are often responsible for delivering good-faith estimates to their patients within 24 hours of scheduling a procedure. Eventually, the “convening provider” also will need to anticipate patients’ potential costs beyond the procedure itself and collect estimates for those and other procedure-related costs from other providers. Because of the emphasis on unexpected emergency care costs during the years of debate leading up to the bill’s passage, many providers may not even realize they are subject to its requirements for non-emergency care.
Learn more about the challenges ahead for health care providers as they seek to comply with the No Surprises Act in the Healthcare Dive article “Surprise billing compliance ‘very daunting,’ regulatory experts say.”