The public hospital — those owned by counties, cities or other local government entities — is an increasingly endangered species.

This article was published on Friday, January 29, 2021 in Kaiser Health News.

By Jordan Rau

In America's healthcare system, dominated by hospital chain leviathans, New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina, is an anomaly. It is a publicly owned hospital that boasts good care at lower prices than most and still flourishes financially.

Nonetheless, New Hanover County is selling the hospital to one of the state's biggest healthcare systems. The sale has stoked concerns locally that the change in ownership will raise fees, which would not only leave patients with bigger bills but also eventually filter down into higher health insurance premiums for Wilmington workers.

Hospital consolidation has been a consistent trend unabated by recessions, bountiful times or even a pandemic. The New Hanover sale, which requires only the approval of the state attorney general for completion, prompts the question: If Wilmington's self-sufficient medical center cannot stand alone, can any public hospital avoid being subsumed into the large systems that economists say are helping propel the cost of American healthcare ever upward?

"We project the prices will go up, they'll probably lay off employees after a couple of years, and the hospital will decline in terms of its quality," said Dale Smith, a retired Wilmington businessman who opposed the sale. Applying his professional experience buying chemical companies to the hospital industry, Smith said: "A very large percentage of mergers and acquisitions, like 90%, never succeed in fulfilling their initial goals."

The public hospital — those owned by counties, cities or other local government entities — is an increasingly endangered species, numbering 965 out of 5,198, according to the American Hospital Association. While the total number of hospitals in the nation dropped by 4% between 2008 and 2018, the number of state or local hospitals decreased by 14%.

Many have been absorbed by large systems. Over the previous 14 years, the percentage of markets where one healthcare system treats more than half the cases grew from 47% to 57%. In 2017, nine out of 10 hospital markets met the federal definition for being highly concentrated.

While the industry says larger systems allow hospitals to run more efficiently, numerous studies have found that charges to insurers and patients are higher from hospitals with more market power. One study calculated the premium to be 7% to 9%; another study found 12%.

"There is a growing consensus that hospital mergers do lead to higher prices," said Christopher Whaley, a policy researcher at the Rand Corp., a research organization.

Novant and backers of the sale disagree that prices will increase more than they would have otherwise. "We looked into the future and we felt we needed more resources," said Spence Broadhurst, who was the co-chair of the committee the county created to evaluate the medical center's future. "We were pretty convinced that the risk of doing nothing was significant."

While the coronavirus inflicted serious financial damage on many hospitals by forcing them to postpone elective surgeries and improve infection control, the outbreak has not stymied mergers and acquisitions. In the third quarter of 2020, Kaufman Hall, a Chicago firm that advises companies on such deals, identified four substantial healthcare transactions, tying the highest number the firm has seen in a single quarter.

"In 2021 and beyond, even more activity in M&A is expected," said Anu Singh, a managing director at Kaufman Hall.

Consolidation has been marching rigorously through North Carolina. Seventy-four percent of North Carolina general hospitals belong to systems, more than any other state except Hawaii, Maine and Rhode Island, according to a KHN analysis of 2018 data from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Since then, in the western part of the state, the investor-owned chain HCA purchased the nonprofit Mission Hospital in Asheville; in the middle, Greensboro-based Cone Health merged with Sentara Healthcare into a 17-hospital system; and on the coast, Novant Health is buying New Hanover.

Both the Mission and New Hanover sales provoked substantial community blowback. New Hanover opened its doors in 1967, in the midst of the civil rights movement, as Wilmington's first integrated hospital. It grew to become the nation's third-largest county-owned hospital, serving seven counties in southeastern North Carolina.

But unlike many public hospitals, the medical center makes money: $110 million in the fiscal year ending in September 2019, which translated to an enviable 10% surplus. It is the largest county-owned system that does not require taxpayer subsidies.

Despite its market leverage as the only general hospital in Wilmington, New Hanover charged private insurers less than did the 24 other North Carolina hospitals for which Whaley and his Rand colleagues could assess inpatient and outpatient prices from 2016 through 2018. New Hanover's prices were 13% lower than UNC Health's, 15% lower than Novant Health's and 32% lower than Atrium Health's, according to the Rand data.

New Hanover has also demonstrated its ability to provide care to Medicare beneficiaries thriftily without sacrificing quality: In the first six months of 2019, its accountable care organization, or ACO, earned a $3 million bonus from Medicare for saving more money than the government expected, according to federal data. Novant's ACO did not reduce costs enough to earn a bonus.

"This is not your typical county hospital. This is a fairly high-functioning hospital with high-quality care and reasonable prices," said Barak Richman, a professor of business administration at Duke Law School.

But leaders in New Hanover County and the medical center announced in 2019 they were exploring either selling the hospital or joining a larger healthcare system. They said they feared the hospital needed more capital and help to keep up with the surging population growth in the region and medical advances, including costly technologies.

The county's request for proposals drew many suitors, including Novant and Atrium, which had been battling for dominance throughout North Carolina's regional healthcare markets. Novant's winning bid, which the county accepted last October, will pay the county $1.5 billion. The county will use most of the money to fund a new nonprofit endowment to bolster community health but will keep $350 million. Novant pledged to invest an additional $3.1 billion to build and upgrade medical facilities and equipment in the region, and it said it would create a branch of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at New Hanover.

"We knew we wanted more," said John Gizdic, president and CEO of New Hanover. "We wanted to do more; we wanted to be more."

Along with the hospital, the sale includes other medical facilities the county owns under the medical center's umbrella: smaller hospitals for children, rehabilitation and mental health on the medical center's campus; a nearby orthopedic hospital, a physicians' group and outpatient centers; and its contract to manage Pender Memorial Hospital, owned by an adjacent county.

Carl Armato, Novant's president and chief executive, noted in an interview that Novant already owns the nearby Brunswick Medical Center, which refers some patients to New Hanover and, he said, provides affordable healthcare. "The two organizations have a unique cultural alignment," he said.

Even some opponents of the deal acknowledged that New Hanover was not guaranteed to remain financially strong. "Owning and running a hospital has got some serious wind in its face," said Bertram Williams III, an investment adviser whose father was a surgeon who helped found New Hanover. "There's a lot of things coming down the pike making it more and more complicated to manage a hospital and keep it above water."

Williams said he expected Novant would need to recoup the money it is spending on the deal. "That money's got to be repaid," he said. "It's going to come from local payers. We know it's going to be higher costs, there's no question about that. Might there be higher costs anyway? Probably."

The sale of the medical center removes the direct leverage local consumers had in influencing the hospitals' prices. Novant agreed to create a local hospital board, with a majority of members living in the service areas, but the board's role will not extend to setting prices.

"Novant Health, what they're proposing to do sounds just too good to be true," said Howard Loving, a retired naval officer who questioned the sale. "To my mind, the first thing that's going to unravel is there's two years with the doctors who are there now, [and then] Novant will have the ability to decide who gets to stay and who gets to go."

State Treasurer Dale Folwell said he expects that, as part of Novant, New Hanover will press for higher rates from the healthcare fund that covers state employees and teachers, which Folwell's office oversees. "I'm their largest customer," he said. "I know we should expect quality to go down, access to go down, prices to go up. And when that happens, public service workers get hit the worst."

Novant disputed that its takeover would lead to higher costs. "Novant Health has a track record of lowering the cost of care to patients compared to other healthcare systems in North Carolina," the organization said in a statement. Novant also noted that more low-income people will qualify for free or lower-cost care under Novant's charity care rules than under New Hanover's.

Unpersuaded, opponents of the sale said the county did not take a serious enough look at finding other ways to raise capital without losing control of the hospital.

"They said the future is scary and unknown," Smith, the retired businessman, said. "The counterargument is, Why don't we wait and see what the future holds?"

"Once this is done," he added, "you can never go back."

Jordan Rau: jrau@kff.org, @JordanRau

One of the happiest days of their lives turned out to be one of the scariest.

This article was published on Wednesday, January 27, 2021 in Kaiser Health News. This story also ran on NPR.

By Cara Anthony

In the nine months leading up to her due date, Kayla Kjelshus and her husband, Mikkel, meticulously planned for their daughter’s arrival.

Their long to-do list included mapping out their family’s health insurance plan and registering for baby gear and supplies. They even nailed down child care ahead of her birth.

“We put a deposit down to hold a spot at a local day care following our first ultrasound,” said Kayla Kjelshus, of Olathe, Kansas.

The first-time parents felt ready for their daughter’s debut on Feb. 15, 2019. But one of the happiest days of their lives turned out to be one of the scariest. Their daughter, Charlie, had a complication during delivery that caused her oxygen levels to drop and put her at risk for brain damage.

“We had a waiting room filled with family and friends,” Mikkel recalled. “To come out and say things aren’t well … it was really hard.”

Charlie was transferred from St. Luke’s Community Hospital to HCA Overland Park Regional Medical Center, where she received treatment in the neonatal intensive care unit, known as the NICU, for the next seven days.

Doctors sent Charlie home with a positive prognosis. The couple had decided that Kayla, a nurse practitioner, would carry Charlie on her insurance plan through Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. Her plan offered better rates than Mikkel’s, and his plan was based in another state and carried a higher deductible. So when the hospital asked for insurance information, Kayla provided her policy number; Mikkel did not.

They expected things to work out fine between the insurance company and the hospitals.

Then the bills came.

The Patient: Charlie Kjelshus, an infant covered by her mother’s plan through Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City and, eventually, her father’s plan, CommunityCare of Oklahoma

Medical Service: Whole body cooling and other treatment in the NICU to prevent brain injury that may result from oxygen deprivation during birth

Service Provider: HCA Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Overland Park, Kansas

Total Bill: Multiple charges totaling $270,951, according to Mikkel Kjelshus, including a charge of $207,455 for the NICU stay

What Gives: Kayla Kjelshus filed a claim with Blue KC, and the insurer started paying for baby Charlie’s care. But then it canceled payments to the HCA Overland Park hospital, St. Luke’s Community Hospital and Charlie’s neurologist, pediatrician and other physicians.

“We thought, ‘This is crazy,’” Mikkel said. “‘We have insurance.’”

What was going on?

The Kjelshus family had slammed into something well known among insurance experts but little understood by the general public. “Coordination of benefits” and “the birthday rule” are the jargon terms for the red tape that snared them.

When a child is born into a family in which both parents have insurance through their jobs, the parents are supposed to “coordinate benefits” — meaning they must tell both insurers that their child is eligible for coverage under two plans. The parents might be forgiven for thinking they have some say in how their child will be insured. In most cases, they don’t.

Instead, a child with double health insurance eligibility must take as primary coverage the plan of the parent whose birthday comes first in the calendar year; the other parent’s insurance is considered secondary. This model regulation was set by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and adopted by most states, including Kansas, said Lee Modesitt, director of government affairs with the Kansas Insurance Department.

For Charlie Kjelshus, the birthday rule meant her dad’s plan — with a $12,000 deductible, a high coinsurance obligation and a network focused in a different state — was primary. Her mom’s more generous plan was secondary.

Mom Kayla said Blue KC dispatched an investigator to discover that dad Mikkel had insurance through his job. The family had not been trying to hide Mikkel’s coverage; they merely weren’t aware of the birthday rule and that they may be subject to state laws that ensure babies are covered for the first 31 days of life.

“If these are the rules of engagement, you need to tell people upfront that these are the rules,” said Dr. Linda Burke, an OB-GYN and author of “The Smart Mother’s Guide to a Better Pregnancy.” “It’s a communication problem.”

After Blue KC informed Mikkel that his insurance had to serve as primary coverage, CommunityCare of Oklahoma did pay Charlie’s bills from the hospitals and other providers. It paid HCA Overland Park $16,605 on the $207,455 NICU charge. The insurer said its negotiated rate on the bill was $35,721. With Mikkel’s deductible and coinsurance, that left the family on the hook for more than $19,116, it seemed.

“When an insurance company finds out that a baby is in the NICU, then it’s a red flag,” Burke said. “They are going to look for ways to cut their losses.”

Resolution: The couple turned to the Kansas Department of Insurance to file a complaint about the bill, but the department declined to help because Kayla’s policy is self-funded by her employer, which means the company is subject to federal rather than state regulations.

After close to a year and a half of going back and forth with their insurance companies and the hospitals, Blue KC paid $19,116 of the Kjelshuses’ bill as a secondary insurer and said the Kjelshuses should not be responsible for a remaining balance of $7,504.51 from HCA Overland Park. But the family kept getting bills.

And, beginning in summer 2020, collections calls from the hospital rolled in daily, leaving the couple frustrated and confused.

Eventually, after a human resources officer at Kayla’s job stepped in to help, they received a statement with a zero balance. Their own calls to HCA Overland Park hospital billing department didn’t get them anywhere.

“We always got a different answer,” Kayla said. “It was so frustrating.”

A spokesperson for the hospital apologized for the deluge of calls from collections.

“We made an administrative error and an automated billing call system for payment occurred, causing the family undue frustration during an already stressful time, and we apologize,” the hospital wrote in a statement. “Once the issue was identified and resolved, the insurance companies processed the claim and we informed the family that there is a zero balance on the account. Again, we are sorry for the stress and inconvenience, and wish them well.”

In a statement, Blue KC acknowledged that coordination of benefits can be confusing for members, and that the company follows rules of state and federal regulators, modeled on standards set by the NAIC. It said the Kjelshuses’ future claims would continue to be paid and that a “dedicated service consultant” would continue to work with Kayla Kjelshus.

In the end, the insurers and hospitals settled Charlie’s bill as they were supposed to: The primary insurer paid first, and the secondary paid what had not been covered by the first. But it took more than a year of phone calls, appeals and complaints before the Kjelshus family had the matter settled. Charlie turns 2 next month.

The Takeaway: In theory, “the birthday rule” would be a fair, if random, way to figure out which insurance should be primary and which secondary for families with insurance from two employers. The presumption is that the premiums, deductibles and networks are roughly similar in both parents’ insurance plans — but that’s simply not the case for many families.

The Kjelshuses found out the hard way they didn’t have a choice about which parents’ insurance was primary. They might have avoided their quagmire if Mikkel had dropped his own coverage and gotten onto Kayla’s plan before Charlie was born.

It’s not clear whose responsibility it is to help families navigate these rules before a baby is born. It’s even more complicated for parents who are divorced or never married. Insurance companies don’t always offer the critical information families need about the coordination of benefits.

“Expecting parents should try to get in touch with their health plan before the baby is born to find out about the coverage rules,” said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at KFF, the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

“Also figure out if they want to switch the entire family onto one plan once the baby is born.”

It’s also a good idea to speak to human resources representatives at both parents’ jobs. The birth of a baby is considered “a qualifying event” for insurance coverage in all group health plans, so families can make decisions about changing coverage at that time. Otherwise, families might have to wait for open enrollment to make coverage changes.

“It is ridiculous to me my wife and I faced so many issues since both parents have health insurance,” Mikkel Kjelshus wrote. His daughter, Charlie, now is covered only by his wife’s plan.

The problem is that the U.S. has struggled with every step of its public health response in its first year of battle against covid-19.

This article was posted on Thursday, January 28, 2021 in Kaiser Health News.

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester

The covid-19 variants that have emerged in the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa and now Southern California are eliciting two notably distinct responses from U.S. public health officials.

First, broad concern. A variant that wreaked havoc in the U.K., leading to a spike in cases and hospitalizations, is surfacing in a growing number of places in the U.S. This week, another worrisome variant seen in Brazil surfaced in Minnesota. If these or other strains significantly change the way the virus transmits and attacks the body, as scientists fear they might, they could cause yet another prolonged surge in illness and death in the U.S., even as cases have begun to plateau and vaccines are rolling out.

On the other hand, variants aren't novel or even uncommon in viral illnesses. The viruses that trigger common colds and flus regularly evolve. Even if a mutated strain of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid, makes it more contagious or makes people sicker, the basic public health response stays the same: Monitor the virus, and any mutations, as it moves across communities. Use masking, testing, physical distancing and quarantine to contain the spread.

The problem is that the U.S. has struggled with every step of its public health response in its first year of battle against covid-19. And that raises the question of whether the nation will devote the attention and resources needed to outflank the virus as it evolves.

Researchers are quick to stress that a coronavirus mutation in itself is no cause for alarm. In the course of making millions and billions of copies as part of the infection process, small changes to a virus's genome happen all the time as a function of evolutionary biology.

"The word 'variant' and the word 'mutation' have these scary connotations, and they aren't necessarily scary," said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

When a mutation rings public health alarms, it's typically because it has combined with other mutations and, collectively, changed how the virus behaves. At that point, it may be named a variant. A variant can make a virus spread faster, or more easily jump between species. It can make a virus more successful at making people sicker, or change how our immune systems respond.

SARS-CoV-2 has been mutating for as long as we've known about it; mutations were identified by scientists throughout 2020. Though relevant scientifically — mutations can actually be helpful, acting like a fingerprint that allows scientists to track a virus's spread — the identified strains mostly carried little concern for public health.

Then came the end of the year, when several variants began drawing scrutiny. One of the most concerning, first detected in the United Kingdom, appears to make the virus more transmissible. Emerging evidence suggests it also could be deadlier, though scientists are still debating that.

We know more about the U.K. variant than others not because it's necessarily worse, but because the British have one of the best virus surveillance programs in the world, said William Hanage, an epidemiologist and a professor at Harvard University.

By contrast, the U.S. has one of the weakest genomic surveillance programs of any rich country, Hanage said. "As it is, people like me cobble together partnerships with places and try and beg them" for samples, he said on a recent call with reporters.

Other variant strains were identified in South Africa and Brazil, and they share some mutations with the U.K. variant. That those changes evolved independently in several parts of the world suggests they might present an evolutionary advantage for the virus. Yet another strain was recently identified in Southern California and flagged due to its increasing presence in hard-hit cities like Los Angeles.

The Southern California strain was detected because a team of researchers at Cedars-Sinai, a hospital and research center in Los Angeles, has unfettered access to patient samples. They were able to see that the strain made up a growing share of cases at the hospital in recent weeks, as well as among the limited number of other samples haphazardly collected at a network of labs in the region.

Not only does the U.S. do less genomic sequencing than most wealthy countries, but it also does its surveillance by happenstance. That means it takes longer to detect new strains and draw conclusions about them. It's not yet clear, for example, whether that Southern California strain was truly worthy of a press release.

Vast swaths of America's privatized and decentralized system of healthcare aren't set up to send samples to public health or academic labs. "I'm more concerned about the systems to detect variants than I am these particular variants," said Mark Pandori, director of Nevada's public health laboratory and an associate professor at the University of Nevada-Reno School of Medicine.

Limited genomic surveillance of viruses is yet another side effect of a fragmented and underfunded public health system that's struggled to test, track contacts and get covid under control throughout the pandemic, Wroblewski said.

The nation's public health infrastructure, generally funded on a disease-by-disease basis, has decent systems set up to sequence flu, foodborne illnesses and tuberculosis, but there has been no national strategy on covid. "To look for variants, it needs to be a national picture if it's going to be done well," Wroblewski said.

Last week, the Biden administration outlined a strategy for a national response to covid, which included expanded surveillance for variants.

So far, vaccines for covid appear to protect against the known variants. Moderna has said its vaccine is effective against the U.K. and South African strains, though it yields fewer antibodies in the face of the latter. The company is working to develop a revised dose of the vaccine that could be added to the current two-shot regimen as a precaution.

But a lot of damage can be done in the time it will take to roll out the current vaccine, let alone an update.

Even with limited sampling, the U.K. variant has been detected in more than two dozen U.S. states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned it could be the predominant strain in the U.S. by March. When it took off in the United Kingdom at the end of last year, it caused a swell in cases, overwhelmed hospitals and led to a holiday lockdown. Whether the U.S. faces the same fate could depend on which strains it is competing against, and how the public behaves in the weeks ahead.

Already risky interactions among people could, on average, get a little riskier. Many researchers are calling for better masks and better indoor ventilation. But any updates on recommendations likely would play at the margins. Even if variants spread more easily, the same recommendations public health experts have been espousing for months — masking, physical distancing and limiting time indoors with others — will be the best way to ward them off, said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a physician and professor at the University of California-San Francisco.

"It's very unsexy what the solutions are," Bibbins-Domingo said. "But we need everyone to do them."

That doesn't make the task simple. Masking remains controversial in many states, and the public's patience for maintaining physical distance has worn thin.

Adding to the concerns: Though case numbers have stabilized in many parts of the U.S. in recent weeks, they have stabilized at rates many times what they were during previous periods in the pandemic or in other parts of the world. Having all that virus in so many bodies creates more opportunities for new mutations and new variants to emerge.

"If we keep letting this thing sneak around, it's going to get around all the measures we take against it, and that's the worst possible thing," said Nevada's Pandori.

Compared with less virulent strains, a more contagious variant likely will require that more people be vaccinated before a community can see the benefits of widespread immunity. It's a bleak outlook for a nation already falling behind in the race to vaccinate enough people to bring the pandemic under control.

"When your best solution is to ask people to do the things that they don't like to do anyway, that's very scary," said Bibbins-Domingo.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Healthcare Foundation.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester: annab@kff.org, @annabarryjester

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

This article was published on Thursday, January 28, 2021 in Kaiser Health News.

By Emmarie Huetteman  Late last month, before President Joe Biden took office and proposed his pandemic relief plan, Congress passed a nearly 5,600-page legislative package that provided some pandemic relief along with its more general allocations to fund the government in 2021.

While the $900 billion that lawmakers included for urgent pandemic relief got most of the attention, some even bigger changes for healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare.

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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare sector that are driving up healthcare costs and making healthcare unaffordable for our nation's families, workers, and employers," it said in a statement.

KHN senior correspondent Sarah Jane Tribble contributed to this report.

Emmarie Huetteman: ehuetteman@kff.org, @emmarieDC