INDIANAPOLIS — At a ceremonial bill signing on Wednesday, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun announced that the state of Indiana is “leading the nation in health care reform.”
Braun ceremoniously signed 10 bills into law on Wednesday, laws that Braun believes will “bring substantial reform to health care in Indiana” through the following solutions:
- Lowering prices
- Health care price transparency
- Eliminating anti-competitive practices
This is something that Braun spoke about at length about these goals during his campaign and during his State of the State address. According to previous reports,
Braun said some healthcare-related topics were seen as “too tough to tackle.”
“I promised Hoosiers I would take on the big health care industry and get solutions to the problems making health care unaffordable,” Braun said in a news release surrounding the ceremonial bill signing. “My partners in the General Assembly and I have enacted landmark health care solutions to bring transparency, accountability, and competition to our health care system. Indiana is now the national leader in health care reform and lowering prices for patients.”
Several bills were celebrated on Wednesday, according to the release, including:
- House Bill 1003: Health matters
- The release said that this was a “priority agenda” bill this session, a bill that incorporated “a number of provisions intended to bring transparency, accountability and enforcement mechanisms to the health care industry.”
- The bill included the following measures:
- Empowers Hoosiers with rare and terminal diseases by expanding the state’s right to try statute to include individualized treatments
- Codified federal protections against suprirse medical bills
- Clarified that patients and employers have an absolute right to access their health information and claims data at no cost
- Reduced the turnaround time from five days to 48 hours in which providers and insurers must provide a good faith estimate for a patient’s out-of-pocket costs for in-patient and/or out-patient treatment
- House Bill 1004: Health care matters
- The release said that this legislation introduced additional initiatives, including:
- Hospital cost transparency
- Requires a nonprofit hospital system to submit audited financial statements
- Requires an Indiana nonprofit hospital system’s aggregate average inpatient and outpatient hospital prices to be equal to or less than the statewide average by 2029
- Establishes a Medicaid state-directed payment program for hospitals.
- SB 2: Medicaid matters
- Officials said this legislation creates “several Medicaid reforms around eligibility, reporting, work requirements and presumptive eligibility.”
- SB 3: Fiduciary duty in health plan administration
- This bill requires pharmacy benefit managers and third party administrators “to have a fiduciary duty to the plan sponsor” that the managers and administrators are acting on behalf on.
- SB 140: Pharmacy benefits
- The release said that this bill prohibits pharmacy benefit managers from utilizing “anti-competitive contracting and business practices against pharmacies.”
- SB 118: 340B drug program report
- This legislation requires covered entities participating in the 340B Discount Drug Program to annually report certain information and financial transactions to the Indiana Department of Health.
- SB 475: Physician noncompete agreements
- This bill prohibits hospitals from requiring a physician to enter a noncompete agreement after July 1.
- HB 1604: Cost sharing; out-of-pocked expense credit
- This bill requires health plans to credit the amount paid for a lower-cost, out-of-pocket healthcare service toward an individual’s deductible. This comes regardless of whether or not the service was provided by an in-network or out-of-network provider.
- HB 1666: Ownership of healthcare providers
- The release said this bill requires hospitals, insurers, pharmacy benefit managers, third party administrators and entities that accept Medicaid and Medicare to report ownership information to the state.
- SB 480: Prior authorization
- The release said this legislation “revises Indiana’s prior authorization regulatory framework to better protect the provider-patient treatment plan and timely access to care.”
For a look at the bills discussed during the 2025 legislative session, click here.