Don’t Confuse Appeals with Balance-Billing!

By: Jon Jablon, Esq.

If you draft, administer, or otherwise manage self-funded health plans, you are likely very familiar with the appeals submission timeframe requirements within the SPD. The relevant regulations prescribe certain timeframes within which a health plan must allow an appeal, and a health plan is certainly free to allow longer periods of time, but abiding by the legal minimums tends to be the common practice.

That’s all well and good, and relatively simple to administer, but they tend to fall flat when applied to balance-billing. Let me explain:

I received an email the other day from a very angry medical provider with whom I had been attempting to resolve a balance-billing scenario, in which the attorney explained that the TPA said to him (and I quote): “On page 83 the plan document says that all payment appeals must be submitted within twelve months of the date of the adverse benefit determination. You have billed the patient seventeen months following the determination. Therefore you are prohibited from billing the patient for the balance.”

A provider’s appeal is to the Plan itself, saying, essentially, “you have underpaid this claim,” whereas balance-billing is to the member, saying “you are responsible for the balance that your health plan has not paid.” While it is certainly possible for a provider to simultaneously appeal to the Plan and balance-bill the member, they constitute two very different demands, and only one – the appeal to the Plan – falls under the purview and limitations of the Plan Document.

I want to do my part to dispel the popular misconception that balance-billing can be eradicated with the right plan language in place. Balance-billing, by definition, is outside the terms of the Plan, and therefore nothing written in the Plan Document can change a provider’s rights. The Plan Document’s terms can and should be used as arguments against balance-billing, of course, and the Plan needs strong language to defend itself – but even the strongest Plan Document language cannot legally prohibit a provider from balance-billing.

Feel free to contact PGCReferral@phiagroup.com, and we’ll do our best to answer all your appeal and balance-billing questions!