Sarah Cliff, senior policy correspondent at Vox. Welcome back.

Thank you. You've been working on this project about massive ER bills for a while now.

When we talked about it on the show back in May, but you're back to talk about it again,

because the government's actually going to do something about it?

They might do something about it. So there are some senators who definitely want to do something

about it. We actually, and this was kind of surprising to me, we saw a bipartisan group of senators

introduced this bill just recently in late September that would outlaw surprise emergency

billing. And this came after I and others have been writing a lot about these bills.

Some senators actually want to do something about it.

Republicans, Democrats. Republicans and Democrats. And then

was surprising to me because when you think about Obamacare repeal, they just fight about

healthcare. But I think these surprise bills are an issue that everyone agrees is bad.

How does the legislation work? What does it do?

So what it would essentially do is a lot of these surprise bills, they come from out of network

providers, billing people who were seen at an emergency room in some kind of emergency situation.

Yeah. And now this out of network surgeon, radiologist, anesthesiologist is saying, I want to be paid.

Your insurance isn't paying me. So I'm coming after you, the patient. These bills would essentially

outlaw that practice. They would say, you know, you're an out of network doctor. You have to go to

the insurance company. Sounds pretty good. It's pretty good. It has some, you know, when I've

talked to health economists about it, they have their quibbles as economists usually do. They say

this is not the best solution. But the guy I trust the most on this, the guy who's been doing

the leading research on this, he says it's 80% to the way there. And you know, that would be a

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