Advocacy Issue: Transparency and Competition

Hospitals and health systems are committed to empowering patients and their families with all the information they need to live their healthiest lives. This includes ensuring they have access to accurate and timely price information when seeking care. Hospitals and health systems have made important progress in adopting federal price transparency requirements that require they both publicly post machine-readable files of a wide range of rate information and provide more consumer-friendly displays of pricing information for at least 300 shoppable services.

AHA Position

The AHA supports price transparency efforts that help patients access clear, accurate cost estimates when preparing for hospital care. The AHA also supports aligning federal price transparency requirements to avoid patient confusion and duplication of effort that adds unnecessary cost and burden to the health care system. Despite hospitals’ increasingly successful efforts to provide transparency to patients, third parties continue to issue reports mischaracterizing compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Rule.