A bill aimed at making sure hospitals keep providing “essential” services was tabled by a state Senate panel Monday, following opposition from hospital administrators, who said it would squelch innovation.
The Senate state affairs committee may reconsider a revised bill this week.
“I think the scope of this bill is much larger than intended,” said Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver.
The bill was described as a response to the proposed transfer of two hospitals — Exempla Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge and Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center in Lafayette — to full ownership by a Catholic health care system.
That move, approved by Attorney General John Suthers but under litigation, would likely result in the hospitals discontinuing services counter to Catholic ethical and religious directives — including sterilization, abortion and contraception.
Senate Bill 182, sponsored by Sen. Betty Boyd, D-Lakewood, and Rep. Anne McGihon, D-Denver, did not identify what are “essential services,” but it proposed that hospitals be required to notify a state board 90 days before discontinuing any “essential health service” and hold a hearing.
The state health board would have the power to take a hospital’s license if it discontinues a key service or can’t find an alternative way for community members to get it.
Steven Summer, president of the Colorado Hospital Association, said the bill would have a “chilling” effect on hospitals’ decisions to innovate with new technology or new services.
“The concern and the fear is that knowing the potential cost of discontinuing services later on . . . they will simply decide not to add services,” Summer said.
The bill has an escape clause, Boyd said: A hospital could cut services for “compelling financial reasons.”
That’s not enough, Summer said. Policies change for nonfiscal reasons: If the lone physician who provides a service at a rural hospital retires and a replacement can’t be recruited at any price, for example.
Standards of care may also change, Summer said, with a service no longer recognized as the best practice.
Patient advocates countered that SB182 would provide an essential way to ensure that local hospitals provide key community services, including labor and delivery, for example.
Ed Kahn, an attorney with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, told the committee that they shouldn’t rely on the free market to ensure that Colorado’s hospitals serve their communities.
