Late last month, before President Biden took office and proposed his new pandemic relief plan, Congress passed a nearly 5,600-page legislative package that provided some pandemic relief along with its more general allocations to fund the government in 2021.
While the pandemic funding got most of the attention, some even bigger changes for health care were buried in the other parts of that huge December package of laws.
The legislative bundle included a ban on surprise medical bills, for example — a problem that key lawmakers had been wrestling with for two years. Starting in 2022, thanks to the new law, patients generally will not pay more for out-of-network care in emergencies and for care at in-network facilities that is provided by an out-of-network doctor or laboratory.
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