Advocacy Issue: Transparency

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.

 

Unfortunately, despite significant efforts over the last decade, the current price transparency framework is not delivering actionable information for patients or useful insights for purchasers and policymakers. Hospitals dedicate substantial resources to comply with a range of federal and state price transparency requirements, including the Hospital Price Transparency Rule and provisions of the No Surprises Act. Yet, patients continue to lack certainty about their expected out-of-pocket costs for a specific course of treatment, and publicly available data is often challenging to use and does not provide meaningful insights.