relative to licensing requirements for health care facilities that operate on a membership-based business model.
What changed between versions
Section 1 of the introduced bill, which created an exception to the licensing and bed capacity moratorium in RSA 151:2, VI(a)(1) for membership-based and direct payment facilities, is entirely deleted from the House amendment.
The new RSA 151:21-c (Patients' Bill of Rights for Direct Payment and Membership-Based Facilities), which established 19 specific patient rights for those facilities, is repealed by Section 9 of the House amendment.
The introduced version's exemption in RSA 151:2-f that allowed direct-pay and membership-based rehabilitation facilities to skip the requirement to provide services regardless of source of payment is removed. The House instead repeals and reenacts RSA 151:2-f without any such exception.
The definition of 'facility' in RSA 151:19, II no longer excludes direct payment and membership-based facilities from the scope of RSA 151:21 (standard patient rights). The reference to RSA 151:21-c in RSA 151:19, VI is also removed.
A new Section 10 adds a conditional applicability provision: Sections 6-9 (which remove the direct-pay exemptions and repeal the special patients' bill of rights) take effect on January 1, 2032 only if no new facilities are licensed under RSA 151 between January 1, 2027 and January 1, 2032. If new facilities are licensed in that window, those sections do not take effect.
The effective date changes from '60 days after passage' to a split structure: the remainder of the act takes effect January 1, 2027, while Sections 6-9 follow the conditional 2032 timeline in Section 10.
