Medicare

While the $900 billion that lawmakers included for urgent pandemic relief got most of the attention, some even bigger changes for health care were buried in the other parts of that huge legislative package.

The bundle included a ban on surprise medical bills, for example — a problem that key lawmakers had been wrestling with for two years. Starting in 2022, because of the new law, patients generally will not pay more for out-of-network care in emergencies and at otherwise in-network facilities.

But surprise bills weren’t the only health care issue Congress addressed as it ended a tumultuous year. Lawmakers also answered pleas from strained health facilities in rural areas, agreed to cover the cost of training more new doctors, sought to strengthen efforts to equalize mental health coverage with that of physical medicine and instructed the federal government to collect data that could be used to rein in high medical bills.

Here are some details about those big changes Congress made in December.

Rural Hospitals Get a Boost

Throwing a lifeline to struggling rural health systems — and, it appears, a bone to an outgoing congressional committee chairman — lawmakers gave rural hospitals a way to get paid by Medicare for their services regardless of whether they have patients in beds.

The law creates a new category of provider, known as a “rural emergency hospital.” Starting in 2023, some hospitals will qualify for this designation by maintaining full-time emergency departments, among other criteria, without being required to provide in-patient care. The Department of Health and Human Services will determine how the program is implemented and which services are eligible.

Medicare, the federal insurance program that covers more than 61 million Americans 65 and older or with certain disabilities, currently does not reimburse hospitals for emergency or hospital outpatient services unless the hospital also offers in-patient care.

That requirement has exacerbated financial problems for rural hospitals, many of which balance serving communities with fewer patients — and less need for full in-patient services — with the need for emergency and outpatient services. One study last year found 120 rural hospital facilities had closed in the past 10 years, with more at risk.

Hospital groups have praised the change, which was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who has championed rural health issues and ended his term as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee this month. “I worked to ensure rural America would not go overlooked,” he said in a statement.

Medicare Invests in More Doctors

Hoping to address a national shortage of doctors that has reached critical levels during the pandemic, Congress created an additional 1,000 residency positions over the next five years.

Medicare will fund the positions, which involve supervised training to medical school graduates going into specialties like emergency medicine and are distributed among hospitals most in need of personnel, including rural hospitals.

Critics like The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have noted this is Congress’ attempt to fix a problem it created in the late 1990s, when lawmakers capped the number of Medicare-funded residency positions in the United States, fearing too many doctors would inflate the cost of Medicare.

While Medicare is not the only source of educational funding and hospitals may add their own residency slots as needed, Medicare generally will reimburse hospitals for the number of residents they had at the end of 1996. Among other consequences of that 1996 cap, most Medicare-funded residencies are clumped at Northeastern hospitals, a 2014 study showed.

In contrast to the 1,000 positions created as part of the stimulus package, one bipartisan proposal in 2019 that was never enacted would have added up to 15,000 positions over five years.

Strengthening Mental Health Parity

The legislative package strengthens protections for mental health coverage, requiring federal officials to study the limitations insurance companies place on coverage for mental health and substance use disorder treatments.

In 1996 Congress passed the first law barring health insurers from passing along more of the cost for mental health care to patients than they would for medical or surgical care. The Affordable Care Act, building on earlier laws, made mental health and substance use disorder treatments an “essential health benefit” — in other words, it required most health insurance plans to cover mental health care.

But enforcing that standard has been a challenge, in part because violations can be hard to spot and the system has often relied on patients to notice — and report — them.

In December, lawmakers approved a measure requiring insurers to analyze their coverage and provide their findings to state and federal officials upon request.

They also instructed federal officials to request the findings from at least 20 plans per year that may have violated mental health parity laws and tell insurers how to correct any problems they find — under penalty of having insurer violations reported to their customers if they do not comply.

The law requires federal officials to publish an annual report summarizing the analyses they collect.

More Transparency in Cost and Quality

Americans often do not know how much they will be expected to pay when they enter a doctor’s office, an ambulance or an emergency room.

Taking another modest step toward transparency, Congress banned so-called gag clauses in contracts between health insurers and providers.

Among other things, these sorts of “gag” restrictions previously have prevented insurers and group health plans from sharing with patients and others — such as employers — information about a provider’s prices or quality. The December legislation also prohibited insurers from agreeing to contracts that prevent them from getting access electronically to claims and other information from providers on behalf of the insurer’s enrollees.

In 2018, Congress banned gag clauses in contracts between pharmacies and insurers or pharmacy benefit managers. Those gag clauses had prevented pharmacists from sharing cost information with patients, like whether they could pay a lower price for a prescription by paying out-of-pocket rather than using their insurance coverage.

The proposal approved in December’s legislation came from a big, bipartisan package of health care cost fixes passed in 2019 by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, but not by the rest of Congress. The committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, retired from Congress this month. His Democratic partner on that package, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, will take over the chairmanship as Democrats assume control of the Senate and has vowed to focus on health care affordability.

Consumers First, a health consumer-focused alliance of health professionals, labor unions and others, led by Families USA, praised the ban. The change is “a significant step forward” to stop “the abusive practices from hospitals and health systems and other segments of the health care sector that are driving up health care costs and making health care unaffordable for our nation’s families, workers, and employers,” it said in a statement.

KHN senior correspondent Sarah Jane Tribble contributed to this report.

Anita Baron first noticed something was wrong in August 2018, when she began to drool. Her dentist chalked it up to a problem with her jaw. Then her speech became slurred. She managed to keep her company, which offers financing to small businesses, going, but work became increasingly difficult as her speech worsened. Finally, nine months, four neurologists and countless tests later, Baron, now 66, got a diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

ALS, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the New York Yankees first baseman who died of it in 1941, destroys motor neurons, causing people to lose control of their limbs, their speech and, ultimately, their ability to breathe. It’s usually fatal in two to five years.

People with ALS often must quit their jobs and sometimes their spouses do, too, to provide care, leaving families in financial distress. A decade-long campaign by advocates highlighting this predicament notched a victory last month when Congress passed a bill opening key support programs earlier for ALS patients.

In late December, then-President Donald Trump signed the bill into law. It eliminates for ALS patients the required five-month waiting period to begin receiving benefits under the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which replaces at least part of a disabled worker’s income. Gaining SSDI also gives these patients immediate access to Medicare health coverage.

Advocacy groups note that the Social Security Administration still will need to set up procedures for implementing the law, before patients will see the benefits.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association, an umbrella organization for people with 43 neuromuscular conditions, partnered with other ALS groups to support the bill to eliminate the SSDI waiting period.

“We’re hopeful that it can serve as a model for other conditions that may be similarly situated,” said Brittany Johnson Hernandez, senior director of policy and advocacy at MDA.

In the weeks leading up to the passage of the bill, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) sought to broaden the scope of the legislation to include other conditions. He pledged to continue to work on legislation to eliminate the SSDI waiting period for additional diseases that meet certain criteria, including those with no known cure and a life expectancy of less than five years.

Eliminating the SSDI waiting period has been a top priority for ALS advocates. There is no simple, single test or scan to confirm that someone has ALS, though symptoms can escalate rapidly. By the time people finally get the diagnosis, they are often already seriously disabled and unable to work. Waiting five months longer for financial aid can be a burden, according to patients and families.

“Five months may seem like a short period of time, but for someone with ALS it matters,” said Danielle Carnival, CEO of I Am ALS, an advocacy group. “It’s a huge win and will make a huge difference for people right away.”

Eligibility for SSDI benefits generally requires people to have worked for about a quarter of their adult lives at jobs through which they paid Social Security taxes. Benefits are based on lifetime earnings; the average monthly SSDI benefit was $1,259 in June 2020, according to the Social Security Administration. (The average retirement benefit was $1,514 that month.)

The SSDI waiting period was intended to make sure the program served only people expected to have claims that would last at least a year, said Ted Norwood, chief legal officer at Integrated Benefits Inc. in Jefferson City, Missouri, who represents SSDI applicants. But it isn’t necessary, he added, because disability rules now require that people have a condition that will keep them out of work at least a year or result in death.

“The five-month waiting period serves no purpose as far as weeding out cases,” Norwood said.

Existing federal law also made special health provisions for people with ALS and end-stage renal disease. Most people with disabilities must wait two years to be eligible for Medicare, but people with either of those two diseases can qualify sooner. ALS patients are eligible as soon as SSDI benefits start.

The new law could have made a big difference for Baron, who lives in Pikesville, Maryland. She and her husband, who works part time at a funeral parlor, didn’t have comprehensive health insurance when she got sick. They were enrolled only in a supplemental medical plan that paid out limited cash benefits.

By the time she was diagnosed and her SSDI and Medicare came through, Baron and her husband had maxed out their credit cards, raided $10,000 from their IRA and gone to their family for money. They were $13,000 in debt. They sold their house and moved into a condo to save on expenses.

“It is imperative that as [people] become more and more debilitated and cannot work, that they have immediate access to SSDI,” Baron said.

Like Sen. Lee, some patient advocates say the accommodations on disability benefits and Medicare made for patients with ALS should be extended to others with similarly intractable conditions.

The Social Security Administration has identified 242 conditions that meet the agency’s standards for qualifying for disability benefits and are fast-tracked for benefit approval.

Once approved, people with these conditions still must wait five months before they receive any money. Now, under the new law, people with ALS can skip the waiting period, though no one else on the “compassionate allowances” list can.

Breast cancer advocates are hoping for similar accommodations for people with metastatic breast cancer. Legislation introduced in the House and Senate in 2019 would have eliminated the SSDI waiting period for this group, but it did not pass.

Tackling the problem one condition at a time doesn’t make sense, others argue.

“Can you imagine, one by one, people with these conditions trying to find people in the House and in the Senate to champion the bill?” said Carol Harnett, president of the Council for Disability Awareness, which represents disability insurers.

Deb McQueen-Quinn thinks it would be good if the new law sets a precedent for eliminating the SSDI waiting period. At 55, McQueen-Quinn has lived with ALS since 2009, far longer than most.

A former convenience store manager, she uses a wheelchair full time now. She knows all too well the toll of the disease. ALS runs in her family, and she’s watched several family members, including her sister, brother and a cousin die of it.

Her sister, a former quality control engineer, was diagnosed in 2006 and died the following year, a week before she would have received her first SSDI payment.

McQueen-Quinn, who lives in Wellsville, New York, with her husband, has two children in their 30s. Her son, 33, carries the familial genetic mutation that leads to ALS. So far he hasn’t developed symptoms. But it’s for people like her son and other family members that she fought for the new law.

“Now that we’ve set the precedent, I’m sure you’ll see a lot of other diseases go after this,” she said.