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What Is the Patients' Bill of Rights?

Emily Yoffe
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2000, at 4:56 PM ET

In their final presidential debate, Al Gore accused George W. Bush of not supporting the Dingell-Norwood bill, or the patients' bill of rights, now pending in Congress. What's in that bill?

It's actually the Norwood-Dingell bill (the Republican, Rep. Charles Norwood of Georgia, gets top billing over the Democrat, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan), or more formally, the Bipartisan Consensus Managed Care Improvement Act of 2000. The legislation, which has passed the House, would cover all Americans with private health insurance, or about 190 million people. Among other things, the bill would put in place strict time limits for insurance companies to approve or deny treatment; if treatment is denied, a timely appeal process would be available as well as the ability to get an outside review, and patients would have the right to sue the provider. It would also guarantee access to specialists and to doctors outside of a plan network, the ability to choose the nearest emergency room even if it's not in the plan, freedom for physicians to discuss all possible treatments, and the right of women to see a gynecologist without a referral and of children to have a pediatrician as their primary physician.

The legislation is being blocked in the Senate, whose far weaker bill would cover about 56 million people. Senate Republicans criticize Norwood-Dingell as overreaching because it usurps state legislation. Although Gore accused Bush of supporting the weaker Senate bill, Bush has not formally endorsed it although he has praised various provisions of both bills. Bush did take credit in the debate for getting a patients' bill of rights passed in Texas. That's not true. He vetoed the 1995 Patient Protection Act and two years later allowed a new bill to become law without his signature.

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Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to .
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[Note from the Fray Editor: This post contains the words "totally bogus theory" and "sanctimony" and "momentary partisan advantage", but we bet you'd never guess which aspect of Explainer, the healthcare issue and the Presidential election is covered. Richard Riley is on the case:]

I'm sorry that Emily Yoffe has bought into the totally bogus theory propounded by the Republicans since they took over Congress in '95 that the primary majority party sponsor "traditionally" gets his or her name first in the name of a bill. I first heard it when some Republican complained that the health insurance bill in 1996 wasn't being called the "Kassebaum-Kennedy" bill. There ain't no such "tradition". The true bill-naming tradition has no partisan aspect: legislation is named after its (single) primary Senate sponsor and its (single) primary House sponsor, in that order. Smoot-Hawley. Taft-Hartley. McCarran-Walter. Landrum-Griffin. More recently, Helms-Burton. (Lousy legislation in every case as it happens!) For all their "conservative" sanctimony, the Republicans are willing to destroy any real tradition they run across for the sake of momentary partisan advantage.

--Richard Riley

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