Senate committee reviews S.28 to expand consumer protections for health-care advertising and tighten provider oversight

A February meeting of the Vermont Senate Health and Welfare Committee on S.28 focused on expanding existing consumer-protection rules for health-care advertising and adding uniform oversight duties across licensed professions.

The bill, sponsored in committee discussion by Senator Ruth Hardy (Addison District), would extend language now applied to limited-service pregnancy centers to ‘‘health care services’’ more broadly, revise definitions used across titles of state law, and add or align unprofessional-conduct provisions in multiple licensing statutes for physicians, advanced practice registered nurses, physician assistants, osteopathic physicians, naturopathic physicians and pharmacists. "This is a bill...that updates some work that we did here in this room and in the legislature 2 years ago related to legally protected health care," Senator Ruth Hardy said.

Support staff and counsel walked the committee through S.28's principal elements. Jen Hardy, legislative counsel, said S.28 "starts out in Title 9 in the Consumer Protection Act" and would make disseminating advertising about health-care services that is "untrue or clearly designed to mislead the public" an unfair or deceptive practice under the Consumer Protection Act. She summarized that the bill narrows multiple long definition lists into a consistent definition of "health care services" and moves some oversight duties from a provision tied to pregnancy service centers into each profession's unprofessional-conduct sections.

Key provisions detailed by legislative counsel…