NurseWeek

Patients’ Bill of Rights compromise?

By Keith W. Murrow
Health24News
September 14, 2000


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Washington (H24N). Four champions for a Patients’ Bill of Rights have joined together, from both sides of the political aisle, with a new compromise bill and hopes of passage before Congress’s fall recess.

Reps. Charlie Norwood (R-Ga.), John Dingell (D-Mich.), Greg Ganske (R-Iowa) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) are all hoping to capture a majority in the Senate with a revised version of the Norwood-Dingell Bill previously passed in the House of Representatives.

Both the House and the Senate have passed two separate pieces of legislation that define the rights a patient has while covered by a health maintenance organization (HMO), but the two legislative bodies have failed to come to an agreement on those definitions.

The new legislation, according to information provided by Norwood’s office in Washington, would affect all private health insurance plans and 160 million Americans enrolled in those programs. The bill covers three times the number of patients initially covered in the Senate bill passed earlier in the year, but leaves states’ rights intact, a concern GOP senators had during failed compromise talks this past spring.

The bill also allows patients the right to sue their HMO, but only in state courts and only in cases in which a provider denies service for treatment deeming it experimental or not medically necessary.

Federal lawsuits would be allowed, but only involving those decisions made by a provider’s administration, not a medically related decision.

John Stone, a spokesman for Norwood, tried to play down the bill, saying, "Nothing is final; we still have a lot of work to do."

Stone said his boss and the other authors of the bill have been targeting key Republicans in the Senate that are up for re-election in November.

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Al Gore and other key Democrats have pounded the issue of an "enforceable Patients’ Bill of Rights" on the campaign trial and in television advertisements since the campaign began.

Previously, when the Norwood-Dingell Bill was voted on in the Senate, all 46 Democrats voted for passage. Since that time, an additional Democrat has joined on, former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat of the late Paul Coverdell (R-Ga.). Coverdell died in July after suffering a brain aneurysm.

The 106^th Congress is set to adjourn Oct 6.