A 5132 New Jersey General Assembly · 2024-2025 Regular Session

Permits clinical laboratories to provide certain patients discounts without affecting NJ FamilyCare reimbursement rates or violating NJ FamilyCare rebate prohibitions.

This bill allows clinical laboratories to offer discounts to patients facing financial hardship without reducing their NJ FamilyCare reimbursement rates or violating rebate prohibitions. Currently, NJ regulations require labs to charge NJ FamilyCare the same rate as all other patients, which has discouraged labs from offering discounts to uninsured or underinsured individuals. The bill permits labs to charge different rates based on financial hardship, with reimbursement rates remaining unaffected for NJ FamilyCare claims. It also dismisses pending enforcement actions against labs for offering such discounts under the previous policy. The bill directly affects clinical laboratories and vulnerable patients who may have been denied affordable lab services due to the previous policy constraints.

Issues: ✓ Healthcare

Bill status in committee 1 of 4 stages cleared

Introduction

Dec 2024

Committee Review

Floor Vote

Governor

Introduced Dec 16, 2024 Last action Mar 10, 2025

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What changed between versions

Introduced Version → Reprint ACF 3/10/25 1R · 3 edits

MINOR

The First Reprint as reported by the Assembly Children, Families and Food Security Committee on March 10, 2025 makes minor grammatical and clarity edits to the Clinical Laboratory Services Reimbursement and Vulnerable Patient Discount Act. The substantive policy content is unchanged; the amendments restructure one sentence for clarity and fix a missing preposition. The bill statement section was removed from this version, which is a procedural formatting change typical of committee reprints.

TECHNICAL

Section 3(c) restructures the sentence about when a laboratory charges a lower price. The phrase 'to an uninsured patient, that patient's treating provider, or another requester of laboratory testing' was moved from before 'a lower price' to after 'NJ FamilyCare,' improving grammatical clarity without changing the meaning.

Section 3(e) adds the missing preposition 'of' in the phrase 'in violation of the current NJ FamilyCare reimbursement policy.'

The bill statement section (which summarized the purpose and provisions of the bill) was removed from this reprint version. This is a procedural change, not a policy change.

Floor votes

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Full legislative history

Actions timeline

Total actions

Key actions

Committee

Mar 10, 2025

Committee

Reported out of Assembly Committee with Amendments and Referred to Assembly Aging and Human Services Committee

lower

Dec 16, 2024

Introduced

Introduced in the Assembly, Referred to Assembly Children, Families and Food Security Committee

lower

1 primary · 0 co-sponsors