Maine Democrats on Tuesday abandoned a proposal to impose price caps on hospital services, yielding to pushback from hospital officials who said the bill would have been \u201ccatastrophic\u201d to health care in the state.<\/p>\n
In an attempt to rein in costs for patients, the bill sponsored by state Rep. Drew Gattine, D-Westbrook, would have required hospitals to cap prices for hospital services at 200% of Medicare rates. <\/p>\n
Gattine submitted an amendment to L.D. 2196<\/a> on Tuesday that eliminated the price caps, the legislation\u2019s central provision. It retained more modest reforms that limit price increases for individual insurance plans, small group plans and the state employee health plan. About 150,000 people have health insurance in those categories, according to the Office of Affordable Health Care.<\/p>\n During Tuesday\u2019s health and human services committee hearing, Gattine conceded that there were strong objections to the hospital price caps.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not as big of a step as the original bill,\u201d Gattine said of the amended legislation. \u201cBut it\u2019s a step that is intended to be impactful.\u201d<\/p>\n Rep. Sam Zager, D-Portland, said the amended bill is much narrower, but that the \u201cstatus quo is not sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n State Rep. Michele Meyer, D-Eliot, a committee co-chair, said \u201cMaine families are being squeezed\u201d by high health care costs.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a small step in the right direction for Maine people, but I believe it\u2019s the right step,\u201d Meyer said.<\/p>\n The committee voted 6-5 in favor of the amended bill, which will be considered on the House and Senate floors. Republicans objected, in part, because they said they wanted to hear from hospital officials about the impact of the amended bill on hospital budgets.<\/p>\n Hospital officials, during a public hearing in front of the committee on March 5<\/a>, said the original bill would result in shuttering services, such as the neonatal intensive care unit at MaineHealth\u2019s Maine Medical Center in Portland, and closing hospitals.<\/p>\n The original bill would have extracted $1 billion in revenue from hospitals during a time when Maine\u2019s hospitals are struggling financially, executives said.<\/p>\n Hospitals routinely charge much higher than Medicare rates for private insurance because Medicare doesn\u2019t cover the cost of the services.<\/p>\n But Gattine and some health policy groups supported the price caps, arguing that cutting costs would result in lower premiums for private insurance plans.<\/p>\n \u201cMaine families have been hit with a wave of bad news: skyrocketing health insurance costs, an explosion in medical debt, rising premiums,\u201d Gattine said at the March 5 hearing. He said the \u201cstatus quo is not sustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n Hospitals have cited financial issues as the reason for service cutbacks in recent years, including Northern Light Health closing\u00a0Inland Hospital<\/a>\u00a0in Waterville last year, MaineGeneral Health shuttering the\u00a0Edmund N. Ervin Pediatric Center<\/a>\u00a0last year,\u00a0and the closures of maternity wards across the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maine Democrats on Tuesday abandoned a proposal to impose price caps on hospital services, yielding to pushback from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":530212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-530211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/530212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}