Hospitals Are Breaking Federal Law and Nobody Cares
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently enacted new federal regulations that require hospitals to make prices readily available and transparent to patients (https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-E/part-180)
The relevant section of the regulations reads:
§ 180.40 General requirements.
A hospital must make public the following:
(a) A machine-readable file containing a list of all standard charges for all items and services as provided in § 180.50.
(b) A consumer-friendly list of standard charges for a limited set of shoppable services as provided in § 180.60.
So what does this law mean?
In short, this law requires hospitals to have a public list of services and prices on their website in a “machine readable” format.
If you google a local hosptial with the term + “price transparency”, you’ll likely be brought to their pages that show price transparency. Here are some pages I pulled up:
Baystate: https://www.baystatehealth.org/patients/pay-your-bill/hospital-standard-charges
Yale: https://www.ynhh.org/patients-visitors/billing-insurance/Pricing
Boston: https://www.bmc.org/visiting-us/pricing-and-estimates
As you can see, these pages offer Excel sheets and “JSON” documents that describe general hospital services. A lot of these documents are hundreds of thousands of pages long and incomprehensible to the average consumer. They’re so large that they actually can crash your computer too, or microsoft word.
So, a regulation that was aimed at consumer transparency has really just made pricing even more ambiguous.
Some hospitals provide good lists, and good online estimators…
But the fact remains that the majority of hospitals are doing a bad job at complying with new law.
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