Price transparency divides hospitals, CMS
Politico January 8, 2025
Driving The Day
LET’S BE TRANSPARENT — Hospitals, CMS and advocacy groups are clashing over how well regulations intended to help patients shop around for health care and drive competition among hospitals are working heading into the Trump administration.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump’s HHS finalized rules requiring hospitals to make public their negotiated prices with insurers.
Groups like PatientRightsAdvocate.org have argued the Biden administration has rolled back the rules, making them less useful, by allowing hospitals to post algorithms instead of prices.
“This Biden CMS basically allowed the hospitals to obfuscate and continue to hide prices,” said Cynthia Fisher, PRA’s founder. “We’ve lost major ground on what is our right by law to know the actual prices up front.”
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