Federal bill would require more transparency from private equity-backed physician practices
A bipartisan bill requiring more transparency from physician practices recently advanced out of a key congressional committee.
Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., introduced their Promoting Access to Treatments and Increasing Extremely Needed Transparency (PATIENT) Act on May 22. The proposal would require physician-owned practices with more than 25 doctors to report information about their business structure, mergers, and acquisitions to HHS on an annual basis. It also would apply to physician practices owned by hospitals, insurers, private equity or venture capital firms, with provider groups facing fines of $2 million for failing to comply.
“We spend more on healthcare as a percentage of our economy than any other developed nation. And for their money, Americans are rewarded with a bureaucratic and overly burdensome system,” McMorris Rodgers said in prepared remarks given at the May 24 meeting of the Energy & Commerce Committee, which she chairs. “They see the corporations responsible for providing and paying for care go to great lengths to hide costs, deny payment for care, and weigh patients down in complexity.”
H.R. 3561 was forwarded to the full House by a bipartisan committee vote of 49-0. The bill incorporates a slew of other proposed changes, including delaying $8 billion in annual Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital payment reductions for two years. It also would impose “billions of dollars a year” in additional site-neutral payment reductions to services provided in off-campus hospital outpatient departments, the American Hospital Association reported.
AHA called the mandatory reporting provisions tied to physician practice ownership “overly burdensome and redundant” to other existing requirements. The Association of American Medical Colleges also commented on the bill May 26, noting that several provisions will impact academic medicine.
In a June 1 news update on the bill, the American College of Radiology noted that it also calls for HHS to issue a report on consolidation trends among physician practices by 2027. The agency would then make this information available to the public.
ACR said it will continue to “monitor this legislation as it progresses.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.