Since the beginning of 2021, hospitals have been required to make their prices transparent to the public.
Five years later, roughly half of them do – more than at any point since the requirement took effect.
But that also means that roughly half of them still do not.
Under the law, hospitals are required to make their prices public via machine-readable files that show standard charges, gross prices, negotiated rates with specific payers, discounted cash prices, and prices for the 300 most commonly provided hospital services.
Progress toward achieving this objective, however, has been slow: compliance estimated at 5.6 percent in July of 2021 rose to 36.1 percent two years later and now rests at 49.4 percent.
While federal officials have threatened action against non-compliance hospitals, those threats have seldom resulted in action. While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has issued many warnings to hospitals, including 500 earlier this summer, it has now fined only 28 hospitals for failing to meet the requirement.
Learn more about hospital price transparency requirements, hospitals’ compliance with those requirements, and federal actions to enforce those requirements from the Healthcare Dive article “More than half of hospitals still not fully compliant with price transparency rules: report.”