Seems to me that ultimately this will have little to no effect since they gave them an escape route.

> Require that health care providers and facilities give you an easy-to-understand notice explaining the applicable billing protections, who to contact if you have concerns that a provider or facility has violated the protections, and that patient consent is required to waive billing protections (i.e., you must receive notice of and consent to being balance billed by an out-of-network provider).

All hospitals will simply make you wave your rights as part of their onboarding process. These rights need to be something that cannot be waived or they actually just add more work for hospitals (ie, more cost for patients) and more work for patients.

Edit: After further reading, in all emergency care scenarios and certain non-emergency care scenarios, they cannot ask you to waive these protections. Though, I wonder who gets to decide if it was an emergency? Certainly not the patient.

If it’s not an emergency it seems logical they can’t start an operation without consent.

I’m worried that the hospital forms will start to include a clause to agree to “waive” the affects of this bill

Yes, and it’ll be done via that little electronic signature pad that doesn’t show what you’re signing for.

Agree with you, I always felt frustrated by signing on pads and not only on Hospitals but Banks as well. I tried to fix this by building a platform for using iPad where one can see the whole document, something like docusign but focused on tablet-based signing. We’ll see how it goes

The No Surprise Act was based on research sponsored by United Health. They were very shady about their involvement.

That doesn’t make it bad by itself.

But it does mean that America can’t pass regulation of the insurance industry unless the insurance industry likes it.

It also might be a way for big players to marginalize smaller players - like Facebook supporting privacy legislation.