Many have complied.
While imperfect and potentially of limited use right now to the average consumer, this trove is, nonetheless, eye-opening as an illustration of the huge differences in prices—nationally, regionally, and within the same hospital. It’s challenging for consumers and employers to use, giving a boost to a cottage industry that analyzes the data, which in turn could be weaponized for use in negotiations among hospitals, employers, and insurers. Ultimately, the unanswered question is whether price transparency will lead to overall lower prices.
And hospitals say the transparency push alone won’t help consumers much, because each patient is different—and individual deductibles and insurance plans complicate matters.
Under the Trump-era rule, hospitals must post what they accept from all insurers for thousands of line items, including each drug, procedure, and treatment they provide. In addition, hospitals must present this in a format easily readable by computers and include a consumer-friendly separate listing of 300 “shoppable” services, bundling the full price a hospital accepts for a given treatment, such as having a baby or getting a hip replacement.
The negotiated rates now being posted publicly often show an individual hospital accepting a wide range of prices for the same service, depending on the insurer, often based on how much negotiating power each has in a market.
In some cases, the cash-only price is less than what insurers pay. And prices may vary widely within the same city or region.
Patients can try to find the price information themselves by searching hospital websites, but even locating the correct tab on a hospital’s website is tricky.
Here’s one tip: “You can Google the hospital name and the words ‘price transparency’ and see where that takes you,” said Caitlin Sheetz, director and head of analytics at the consulting firm ADVI Health in the Washington, D.C., area.
By clicking on the list of shoppable services, consumers can download an Excel file. Searching it for “colonoscopy” pulls up several variations of the procedure, along with prices for different insurers, such as Aetna and Cigna, but a “not available” designation for the cash-only price. The file explains that MedStar doesn’t have a standard cash price but makes determinations case by case.
Performing the same Google search for the nearby Inova health system results in less useful information.
Because of the difficulty of navigating these websites—or locating the negotiated prices once there—some consumers may turn to sites like Turquoise. Doing a similar search on that site shows the prices of a colonoscopy at MedStar by insurer, but the process is still complicated. First, a consumer must select the “health system” button from the website’s menu of options, click on “surgical procedures,” then click again on “digestive” to get to it.
There is no similar information for Inova because the hospital system hasn’t yet made its data accessible in a computer-friendly format, said Chris Severn, CEO of Turquoise.
Inova spokesperson Tracy Connell said in a written statement that the health system will create personalized estimates for patients and is “currently working to post information on negotiated prices and discounts on services.”
- Patients who are paying cash or who have unmet deductibles may want to compare prices among hospitals to see if driving farther could save them money.
- Uninsured patients could ask the hospital for the cash price or attempt to negotiate for the lowest amount the facility accepts from insurers.
- Insured patients who get a bill for out-of-network care may find the information helpful because it could empower them to negotiate a discount off the hospitals’ gross charges for that care.
But the data may not help insured patients who notice their prices are higher than those negotiated by other insurers.
In those cases, legal experts said, the insured patients are unlikely to get a bill changed because they have a contract with that insurer, which has negotiated the price with their contracted hospitals.
“Legally, a contract is a contract,” said Mark Hall, a health law professor at Wake Forest University.
Richman agrees.
“You can’t say, ‘Well, you charged that person less,’” he noted, but neither can they say they’ll charge you more.
Getting the data, however, relies on the hospital having posted it.
They argue the rule is unclear and overly burdensome. Additionally, hospitals haven’t wanted their prices exposed, knowing that competitors might then adjust theirs, or health plans could demand lower rates. Conversely, lower-cost hospitals might decide to raise prices to match competitors.
The rule stems from requirements in the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration required hospitals to post their chargemaster rates, which are less useful because they are generally inflated, hospital-set amounts that are almost never what is actually paid.
“A lot of members say until hospitals are fully compliant, our ability to use the data is limited,” said Shawn Gremminger, director of health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers.
His group and others have called for increasing the penalty for noncomplying hospitals from $300 a day to $300 a bed per day, so “the fine would be bigger as the hospital gets bigger,” Gremminger said. “That’s the kind of thing they take seriously.”
Already, though, employers or insurers are eyeing the hospital data as leverage in negotiations, said Severn. Conversely, some employers may use it to fire their insurers if the rates they’re paying are substantially more than those agreed to by other carriers.
