House Bill 2081 recently passed out of Oregon’s House with bi-partisan support. It intends to keep down costs in all silos of the health care system by setting insurer and provider incentives to maintain a consistent health care cost growth rate that lower overall costs for the patient.
This bill builds off of previous legislation in SB 889, which established the Health Care Cost Growth Benchmark designed to control health care expenditures’ rapid growth in the state. Since its passage in 2019, the Implementation Committee created recommended benchmarks and a final report on the program logistics. The program launched in February 2021.
House Bill 2081 will create an “accountability mechanism” for providers and insurers whose cost remains high, according to Jeremy Vandehey, the director of the health policy and analytics division at the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). The concept of transparency will lead the effort to keep insurers and providers accountable to stay within the cost-growth target. If that doesn’t work, the next step will be implementing improvement plans mandated by the OHA. After that, insurers and providers could receive a financial penalty. Vandehey said: