Contact your State
Senator ASAP
Find your
State Senator at
http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/
Senate Bill 1101
by Sen. Robert Duncan (R-Lubbock) relating to the reporting
and disclosure of financial arrangements between referring
health care providers and diagnostic imaging providers is on
the Senate’s Intent Calendar for
today, May 8th.
In its current form,
this bill is bad for physicians.
The bill would require an imaging facility -
when a physician refers a patient for a CT scan, an MRI, or a
PET scan - to report to the state any ownership interest the
physician has in the imaging facility or equipment.
Imaging facilities would have to pay an annual
fee of up to $500 for collecting and reporting this data.
The bill's supporters say SB 1101 is just a way
to collect data on the use of expensive diagnostic imaging
services. If that's the case, it should apply to all imaging
facilities: in hospitals and free-standing, owned or not by
physicians.
The bill allows facilities to make this report
to the state by simply turning in copies of their claims for
imaging services. Those claim forms, by the way, would
immediately become public information, violating privacy
rules. The bill would set a bad precedent of requiring
physicians and health care facilities to pay for studies the
state wants to conduct regarding how health care services are
used.
