PAGD Keystone Explorer Spring 2021

Keystone Explorer | Spring 2021 5 executive director’s message | Assignment of Benefits – The year was 2002. Hobbits ruled movie screens, Justin and Britney were still an item, and Sanyo turned out the first cell phone that had a camera on it. Meanwhile, at PDA, a fresh-faced 26-year- old named Steve started an all-too-brief tenure in the government relations department. What was on the legislative wish list in 2002? Legislation that would allow patients to assign PPO benefits directly to out-of-network providers. It’s still there. Assignment of Benefits legislation would relieve patients of the burden of paying up front or going through the collections process when seeing an out-of-network doc. It has been close to the finish line a few times, but recently has been bogged down with the aforementioned balance billing prohibitions, which would make the cure worse than the disease. The goal for 2021, just as it has been for the last nineteen years, is to see it through both chambers, and have it come out as clean as possible. In addition, here are some of the other legislation that PAGD is monitoring: » House Bill 325 would allow licensing boards the freedom to provide advisory opinions without the crushing reality of a potential lawsuit resulting. Is that a good thing? I guess it depends on the advisory opinion they give you. » House Bill 466 would forgive student loans for practitioners that agree to practice in underserved areas. Now if we only had graduates with exorbitant loan burdens. » House Resolution 68 would direct the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to study dental access in rural areas and provide options for improvement. Meanwhile, dental stakeholder groups who think and read about these issues nonstop are throwing their hands in the air like nerds in the back row of a fourth- grade classroom. Over 2,000 bills are introduced in a two-year legislative cycle, and PAGD is reviewing them all to pick out the ones that would be of greatest interest to general practitioner dentists. See one that we missed? Let me know, the eye in the sky can cover a lot of ground.