U.S. Representative for Iowa’s Third District Cindy Axne (D) recently introduced a piece of legislation to protect Americans from “surprise bills” from insurance companies.

Axne led a group of freshman Democrats to introduce the UPDATE Act which requires health insurance companies to regularly update their provider directories to prevent patients from unknowingly receiving out-of-network care.

Axne explains how people wind up with surprise bills, “Well, there’s no requirement for insurance companies to update their list, so people in many cases end up choosing a doctor who is no longer in the network. Then they get hit with a bill for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars that they can’t afford, and quite honestly, that’s their responsibility to take care of it. So this puts the onus back on the insurance companies where it should be to update their records and ensure that anybody in their network is actually in their network, so that Iowans don’t see surprise bills that they can’t afford.”

Axne says this bill would require insurance companies to check with a provider if they have not received a bill from them in the last six months in order to identify if that provider has gone out of network, and then to update their directory information accordingly.