On Wednesday afternoon, October 3, 2018, the United States Senate accomplished a rare feat – passing a bipartisan bill with a vote of 98-1. The bill now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk, following the vote in the Senate and a prior vote in the House of Representatives of 393-8.
This legislation adds multiple resources to the opioid epidemic as well as restrictions intended to aid in the fight against the spread of the epidemic. The bill is a combination of dozens of smaller proposals sponsored by hundreds of lawmakers, many of whom are currently in the middle of tough reelection fights. The legislation creates, expands and reauthorizes programs and policies across almost every federal agency, aiming to address different aspects of the opioid epidemic, including prevention, treatment and recovery.
The legislation expands Open Payments, beginning January 1, 2022, applicable manufacturers and distributors will have to report payments made to Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, Nurse Midwifes, Nurse Anesthetists, and Clinical Nurse Specialists in Open Payments, in addition to current physician reporting requirements. At that time, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin to collect and publish NPI numbers on clinicians.
The passage of this legislation follows last month’s bill in the Senate that also addressed the opioid crisis and also passed on a huge bipartisan margin: 99-1.
“We are in the midst of contentious disagreement about the Supreme Court. But at the same time, we have an urgent, bipartisan consensus, a virtually unanimous agreement, to deal with the most urgent public health epidemic facing our country today in virtually every community,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate health committee and lead sponsor of the bill.
It’s interesting to note that the part of the legislation that expands Open Payments reporting requirements to include other care providers follows a law on the books in Massachusetts. We previously wrote about the Massachusetts law and the impact the broader reporting requirements had on payments. At that time, additional clinicians only represented less than four percent of the total payments to clinicians in 2012. Therefore, one may extrapolate and conclude that the additional reporting requirement will not result in much additional reporting but is still likely to increase patient confusion and uncertainty.