On Friday, February 21, 2025, we had an important win for WSDA’s dental benefits reform efforts on behalf of dentists and the patients you serve. An amended version of our bill, SB 5351, was voted unanimously out of the Senate Committee on Health & Long-Term Care, hitting an important milestone that allows the bill to continue moving forward in the legislative process.

The amended bill makes meaningful progress on all four of the major policy issues we proposed in our original legislation.

• Same-Day Denials: The amended bill would prohibit same-day denials, the practice that some insurance companies have engaged in to deny claims for multiple procedures just because they were performed during a single appointment as other covered procedures.
• Virtual Credit Cards: The amended bill would prohibit insurance companies from requiring dental offices to accept payment through virtual credit cards that carry processing fees.
• Dental Loss Ratio: The amended bill would require that stakeholders on both sides undergo a mediation process on the issue of establishing a minimum dental loss ratio, directed by the impartial William D. Ruckelshaus Center, a well-respected joint effort of the University of Washington and Washington State University.
• Non-Network Reimbursement Fairness: The amended bill would require that stakeholders on both sides undergo a mediation process on the issue of parity between in-network and out-of-network reimbursements for all carriers, also directed by the Ruckelshaus Center.

The dental benefits industry lobbied aggressively against the latter two reforms and their inclusion in the amended legislation. Delta Dental of Washington (DDWA) lobbied particularly hard to completely remove non-network reimbursement fairness from this version of SB 5351, consistently declaring the issue a "non-starter” for DDWA to agree to negotiate on the legislation. Today’s committee vote rejected DDWA’s position of ignoring this issue in favor of addressing the concerns raised by WSDA and concerned dentists through the Ruckelshaus Center mediation process — an important win for patients who utilize some form of dental benefit.

The Ruckelshaus Center mediation process would force the dental benefits industry, including DDWA, to the negotiation table on dental loss ratio and non-network reimbursement fairness, providing a path forward for resolving these important issues. The process would be fact-based and data-driven, with information on both issues carefully analyzed and understood. The Ruckelshaus Center would come back to the Legislature with a recommendation, and lawmakers take those recommendations very seriously. WSDA believes this process would ultimately present a compelling case to legislators for why these dental benefits reforms are necessary to better serve the patients of Washington state.

WSDA continues to fight on behalf of dentists and patients to get this bill over the finish line, and we will need your help! DDWA and other carriers do not want to enter the mediation process on dental benefits reforms, and passing SB 5351 would force them there. Please be on the lookout for future calls to action to support this important legislation as it moves through the process in Olympia.