ASSEMBLY FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND INSURANCE COMMITTEE

STATEMENT TO

ASSEMBLY, No. 5376

with committee amendments

STATE OF NEW JERSEY

DATED:  JUNE 19, 2025

      The Assembly Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee reports favorably and with committee amendments Assembly Bill No. 5376.

     As amended, this bill creates the Health Care Cost Containment and Price Transparency Commission (commission), the Office of Healthcare Affordability and Transparency (office), and hospital price transparency regulations.

     Under the bill, the purpose of the office is to provide support, staffing, infrastructure, and expertise to the commission, and to comprehensively address health care cost growth while also establishing data analytics and public reporting mechanisms to ensure healthcare affordability, informed policymaking, and access for future generations.  The office is to establish guidelines for health care entities to submit necessary data for the yearly evaluation of total health care expenditures, their incremental growth, pricing information, pricing incremental growth, the formulation of the healthcare cost growth benchmark and the hospital price benchmark, and for publishing relevant data publicly.

     Under the bill, the purpose of the 18 member commission is to: monitor, analyze, and contain health care prices by identifying drivers of health care cost growth including hospital price growth; establishing and adopting a health care cost growth benchmark and a hospital price growth benchmark; identifying health care entities that exceed the benchmark or benchmarks; and addressing increases in excess of the benchmark or benchmarks through public transparency, opportunities for remediation, and other actions, including civil penalties.  The commission is to set a cost growth benchmark for health care entities.  The commission is to impose civil penalties, pursuant to the "Penalty Enforcement Law of 1999," P.L.1999, c.274 (C.2A:58-10 et seq.), on health care entities that either fail to respond to the commission’s request to submit a corrective action plan or comply with the requirements of a corrective action plan. 

     The bill provides that the Department of Health is to require hospitals to be in compliance with federal hospital price transparency requirements and provide a written warning notice to, or request a corrective action plan from, any hospital that is not in compliance with these federal requirements.  A hospital is to be prohibited from attempting to collect a medical debt from a patient if the hospital is not, at the time of providing medical services to the patient, in compliance with the provisions of this bill.  A hospital that fails to act in accordance with the provisions of this bill is to be liable to a civil penalty of $10 per day per hospital bed for each offense, pursuant to the "Penalty Enforcement Law of 1999," P.L.1999, c.274 (C.2A:58-10 et seq.).

COMMITTEE AMENDMENTS:

      The committee amended the bill to remove the appropriation provided to the Office of Health Care Affordability and Transparency and to make certain technical changes.