Sonnenberg bill aims for more hospital transparency

It will be a busy week ahead for the lawmakers from northeastern Colorado, with the first full week of committee hearings, including four bills sponsored by Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, R-Sterling, and Rep. Rod Pelton, R-Cheyenne Wells.

But whether all four would make it out of their assigned committees is debatable, given where those bills have been assigned.

The Senate State, Veterans & Military Affairs Committee reviewed two of Sonnenberg’s bills on Tuesday, Feb. 1. (As of press time, the bills had not gone through the committee hearing.)

With Democrats now in charge of both chambers for the fourth year in a row, they’ve used the State Affairs committees in both the House and Senate as a place to send bills they don’t want to see succeed.

Senate Bill 38 is Sonnenberg’s attempt to allow hospital patients to see the billing for the Hospital Provider Fee, a measure that levies a fee (Sonnenberg and other conservatives call it a tax) charged on each hospital patient stay per day.

The provider fee has been in state law since 2009, intended to help provide health care coverage for uninsured patients who had been tapping emergency rooms for their nonemergency care.

The fee, which according to the Colorado Department of Healthcare Policy and Financing, is charged on daily occupied beds and outpatient services, and is not to exceed 6% of net patient revenues. Those dollars are then matched with federal dollars and redistributed to hospitals to cover the cost of uncompensated care (that’s the uninsured) and to help cover the cost of Medicaid and the Child Health Plan Plus (known as CHP+), which covers health care for low-income pregnant women and children who don’t qualify for Medicaid.

In 2017, Sonnenberg was among a quartet of bipartisan lawmakers who sponsored a bill, known as Sustainability of Rural Colorado, that converted the provider fee to an enterprise, a type of state-run business. The fee was generating some $500 million per year, and since it was subject to revenue limits under Taxpayer Bill of Rights, the fee would trigger a TABOR refund, paid for with general fund revenues (that’s income and sales taxes).

However, Coloradans have never seen just how much of their hospital bills come from the fee; the law has never allowed hospitals to show it.

That’s what Sonnenberg hopes to accomplish with SB 38: to allow hospitals to show the provider fee on their bills. SB 38 is viewed as a transparency measure.

Lawmakers have been eager to pass bills in the last few years increasing transparency of hospital billing, with a 2019 law that eliminated “surprise” billing. That’s when a patient unknowingly receives services from an out-of-network health care provider. That’s particularly common in emergency room visits, according to the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.

The full article is available in our e-Edition. Click here to subscribe.