HOUSTON – You know how you never really know how much a hospital stay will cost until you get the bill in the mail?
President Donald Trump is aiming to improve price transparency on healthcare costs by directing federal agencies to strictly enforce an order that’s been largely ignored since 2019.
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The order directs the Departments of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services to come up with a framework to force health insurers and hospitals to disclose healthcare cost details within 90 days.
While hospitals were forced to list prices on their website years ago, it’s often difficult to find, or requires a login or it’s broken down into codes most people don’t understand.
Turquoise Health is an independent company to simplify costs of healthcare. Joe Wisniewski with Turquoise Health compares medical price transparency to buying a car. Wisniewski said the first step was just to get the MSRP sticker on the window and now challenges still exist to make the prices easy to understand.
“Many hospitals are trying to follow these rules, but they’re written in a way that’s not really for patient usage yet,” Wisniewski said. “So they’re required to post all the rates online, but they’re not bundled together, right? If you and I are looking around for a knee replacement or a knee repair surgery, we get hurt skiing or something, obviously, I expect someone to knock me out during that surgery, right? But that’s a whole other anesthesiology code, a whole other group of rates that again, an average patient shouldn’t need to understand.”
This order has been strongly opposed by hospital groups who argue it forces them to disclose private negotiations with insurers, violating their first amendment free speech rights. Some took that all the way to court, and it was rejected.
