Cal. HSC § 1395.5

This is the official text of Cal. HSC § 1395.5, part of California’s Health and Safety Code — covers public health, hospitals, controlled substances, and environmental health standards.

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Official statutory text

(a) Except as provided in subdivisions (b) and (c), no contract that is issued, amended, renewed, or delivered on or after January 1, 1999, between a health care service plan, including a specialized health care service plan, and a provider shall contain provisions that prohibit, restrict, or limit the health care provider from advertising.

(b) Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit plans from establishing reasonable guidelines in connection with the activities regulated pursuant to this chapter, including those to prevent advertising that is, in whole or in part, untrue, misleading, deceptive, or otherwise inconsistent with this chapter or the rules and regulations promulgated thereunder. For advertisements mentioning a provider’s participation in a plan, nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit plans from requiring each advertisement to contain a disclaimer to the effect that the provider’s services may be covered for some, but not all, plan contracts, or that plan contracts may cover some, but not all, provider services.

(c) Nothing in this section is intended to prohibit provisions or agreements intended to protect service marks, trademarks, trade secrets, or other confidential information or property. If a health care provider participates on a provider panel or network as a result of a direct contractual arrangement with a health care service plan that, in turn, has entered into a direct contractual arrangement with another person or entity, pursuant to which enrollees, subscribers, insureds, and other beneficiaries of that other person or entity may receive covered services from the health care provider, then nothing in this section is intended to prohibit reasonable provisions or agreements in the direct contractual arrangement between the health care provider and the health care service plan that protect the name or trade name of the other person or entity or require that the health care provider obtain the consent of the health care service plan prior to the use of the name or trade name of the other person or entity in any advertising by the health care provider.

(d) Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair or impede the authority of the director to regulate advertising, disclosure, or solicitation pursuant to this chapter.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.