President’s Legislative Update

The State Legislative Session ended in mid-May. It was an extraordinarily busy session. The Association Lobbyist followed multiple bills important to Physical Therapists in Colorado. Chris Edmundson, Governance Affairs Chair, testified on behalf of APTACO on House Bill 1116-Contracts Between Carriers and Providers. This Bill requires that any contract between a health insurance carrier and a health care provider include at least one method of payment to the provider that does not have a fee and prohibits that contractor from only accepting virtual credit card payments. In addition, the bill allows providers to charge a reasonable fee related to transaction management, data management or other value-added services back to the carrier-essentially allowing you to recoup fees on virtual payments. Enforcement of this section is under the Commissioner of Insurance. The Bill had bipartisan support with a 57-2 vote in the House and 35-0 vote in the Senate and was signed into law by Governor Polis. This law will go into effect on August 7, 2023. At this time, APTA is not able to provide guidance on what would be considered a reasonable fee or how best to charge the carrier. Through coordination with the bill sponsors and other provider groups, we intend to send out guidance to our members prior to August 7th.

Our Lobby team, with speed and foresight, headed off Medicaid’s attempt to require Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) compliance for outpatient therapies that are delivered by telehealth. This was a departure from the Association’s understanding that EVV requirements would only be limited to Home Health. We shared our concerns and our plan to run a bill to prevent the EVV requirement resulting in Medicaid decision not to move forward with the changes.

Our Bill to allow physical therapists and physical therapists assistants to obtain Level 1 Accreditation in the Colorado Worker’s Compensation System was not introduced. With many new members in the State Legislature and their desire to advance their causes, our Bill was not considered. House Leadership was incredibly strict on what bills would be introduced and ours was not one of them. We did secure bipartisan sponsorship and will re-introduce the Bill next year.

Sunset Update
In 2024 the Colorado Physical Therapy Practice Act is up for Sunset Review. This means that our Practice Act may be modified by the State Legislature. APTA Colorado has been gathering input from members on potential revisions to the Practice Act and we have begun discussions with interested parties. The Association met with the Department of Regulatory Agencies’ (DORA) Analyst three times. We have discussed our answers to the required Statutory Questions and the changes we will be pursuing in Colorado’s Physical Therapy Practice Act. The Analyst accepted our offers to observe classes at Regis University and Sarah Gallagher’s Private Practice South Valley PT. Our interest in providing those opportunities was to deepen the Analyst ‘s understanding of Physical Therapist education and practice. Dora’s report will be completed in October of 2023. In the meantime, we are meeting with other interested parties, identifying physical therapists we may need to testify on our behalf and continue to raise money to support the Sunset 10/30 Campaign. I want to THANK you if you have donated your $30 to the campaign. If not, you can donate by texting “APTA” to 243725.  We have raised $5,880.00 of our goal of $60,000 on our text to give site.

Jill Flaherty, PT, MS
President
American Physical Therapy Association Colorado Chapter