The Colorado House Health and Human Services Committee will be considering the Prior Authorization Reform bill HB24-1149 on Feb 21, 2024. Obtaining prior authorizations for patients is a challenge faced nearly every day by the staff at TLC. In case you are not aware, many tests, like MRIs, and many medications require prior authorizations in order for them to be covered by insurance. The TLC staff works diligently to obtain the authorizations as quickly as possible. Occasionally, the process is quick (15-30 min), but more often than not, the process takes longer, requires sending documentation, appealing denials, and can even require time from Dr Hopp to discuss the case with a representative from the insurance company. For TLC, it is very rare that the request is not ultimately approved, but in the interim, a lot of staff time is spent on something other than patient care. The process can take days to weeks, and occasionally months, which delays important testing.

Here is additional information from the Colorado Academy of Family Physicians: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z14CiDdSDdBpbM2VBhFb9kb64zwkeys6/view

What can you do?

• Find out if your representative is on the Health and Human Services Committee. This website can be used to determine who your representative is and will provide an email address and other contact information: https://leg.colorado.gov/FindMyLegislator
  This website shows who is on the Health and Human Services Committee: https://leg.colorado.gov/committees/health-human-services/2024-regular-session-0
• If your representative is on the committee, contact them today and urge them to support HB24-1149. If your representative is not on the committee, it would still be helpful to contact them, raise their awareness of the pending legislation, and urge them to support it.

Thanks for your support. We will keep you updated on future updates.