After warning many hospitals that they were not in compliance with a 2019 requirement that they post their prices on the internet, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has now fined two hospitals for failing to do so.
Policy-makers and advocates have been warning for some time that too many hospitals were not complying with the requirement: a JAMA report found that within six to nine months of the requirement’s implementation only six percent of 5200 hospitals met the requirement and a later review conducted by patient advocates found only 14 percent of 1000 hospitals surveyed in compliance.
Eventually CMS acted, sending warning notes to 352 hospitals and requesting corrective action plans of 157 of them that failed to come into compliance. Finally, the agency issued fines of more than $1 million to two hospitals for non-compliance with federal price transparency requirements.
Learn more about the state of hospital compliance with federal price transparency guidelines and CMS’s actions in response to the situation in the Washington Post report “Two hospitals are being fined for disobeying price transparency rules.”