White House Wants Higher Penalties For Hospitals Dodging Price Disclosure
In a proposed rule, the Biden administration is asking for sharply higher penalties for larger hospitals that don't make their pricing clear to the public. The government demands price transparency on at least 300 "shoppable" services, but a study says less than 6% of hospitals comply.
The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Proposes Raising Penalty For Hospitals That Don’t Publish Prices
The Biden administration on Monday proposed sharply higher penalties for larger hospitals that don’t make their prices public. The proposal would also clamp down on the use of special coding embedded in hospital webpages that prevents Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other search engines from displaying price pages in search results. (Evans, Mathews and McGinty, 7/19)
Modern Healthcare:
Biden To Crackdown On Hospital Price Transparency Violations
The Biden administration wants to increase fines for hospitals that are not making clear, accessible pricing information available online, according to CMS' proposed outpatient pay rule on Monday. The agency has proposed increasing the minimum fine for violations of the hospital price transparency rule to $300 per day for hospitals with 30 or fewer beds. Hospitals with more than 30 beds would have to pay $10 per day for each bed up to $5,500 daily. Hospitals could face annual fines of $110,000 to more than $2 million, depending on their size. (Brady, 7/19)
Modern Healthcare:
Few Hospitals Comply With Price Transparency Rule, Study Shows
Less than 6% of hospitals are fully compliant with the federal requirement that health systems publicly disclose the prices they charge for medical care, according to a newly published report. More than 80% of 500 randomly selected hospitals did not publish the charges negotiated with third-party payers, half didn't disclose any negotiated rates at all and around 40% did not disseminate discounted cash prices, according to a Patient Rights Advocate analysis conducted from May to July. The overwhelming majority of hospitals did not post all payer-specific and plan-specific negotiated rates. (Kacik, 7/19)
