Thanks to a reader who left a comment yesterday in this previous post and alerted me to this development: “Federal court dissolves ‘any will provider’ injunction.” In the previous post, I noted how an Arkansas any willing provider law (“AWP law”) had been barred from being enforced after a federal appeals court in 1998 issued an injunction, concluding that the law ran contrary to ERISA. However, as many of you know, the U.S. Supreme Court case of Kentucky Association of Health Plans v. Miller, decided back in April of last year, held that Kentucky’s AWP law was not preempted by ERISA (discussed in previous posts which you can access here.) After the Miller case, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield filed suit in federal court back in August asking for “a judicial determination” on how the Miller case impacted the Arkansas AWP law. Certain providers had been writing Blue Cross, demanding access to the plans’ network and citing the Supreme Court case as authority for the proposition that the Arkansas law should be enforced.
According to this recent article, the injunction has now been lifted by a federal district court in Arkansas and “Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Arkansas may soon have to open up its massive statewide managed care network to “any willing provider,” or any provider willing to abide by its network rules.”