‘Awful’ Frist Bill ‘Fails’ Patients, Wall Street Journal Columnist Writes

The patients' bill of rights legislation being supported by the Bush administration is a "capitulation to health maintenance organizations" and an "awful" bill, Wall Street Journal columnist Albert Hunt writes in an op-ed (Hunt, Wall Street Journal, 5/17). The bill, sponsored by Sens. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), John Breaux (D-La.) and Jim Jeffords (R-Vt.), would afford all patients with private health insurance a "slender" right to sue their health plans after exhausting an appeals process by an outside review panel. Patients could only sue health plans in federal court, not state court, and awards would be capped at $500,0000. The law allows states that have a patients' rights law in place to be exempt from the federal law if they can prove that the state law's provisions are "consistent with federal law" (Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 5/16). Hunt writes that the bill "fails" to "embrac[e]" the principles of the American Medical Association and other medical associations, which contend that patients' rights legislation should establish that medical decisions be made by physicians, that rules should cover all Americans, that denied claims should be subject to an internal and external review, and that HMOs should be "just as accountable" in the court system as physicians for decisions that result in harm to patients. Further, Hunt takes issue with the bill for moving all lawsuits into federal court, where they would be "harder to bring" and "not good procedure anyway" -- he notes that both Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the Association of State Attorneys General have said that "legal actions against HMOs belong in state courts, the same courts that physicians face." Hunt adds that right-to-sue laws in states such as Texas and Georgia have neither produced a flood of lawsuits nor led to "runaway health care costs," but have led to more "responsibl[e]" behavior by HMOs. "The real issue," Hunt concludes, "is whether HMOs can continue to practice their Darwinian brand of medicine or have to face the same standards that doctors, and most other interests, face every day" (Hunt, Wall Street Journal, 5/17).