Senate Republicans' health care price transparency proposal meets resistance
Critics of the legislation, such as the American Hospital Association, say it would place a burden on already beleaguered health care systems.
GOP lawmakers have introduced legislation that simultaneously requires hospitals and insurers to reveal their lowest prices while negating any legal challenges from those groups.
Senate Republicans called the PRICE Transparency Act, which seeks to codify the Trump Administration’s hospital and insurance policies, a measure to “empower patients and lower health care costs.”
The bill was introduced by Senators Mike Braun (R-IN), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Kennedy (R-LA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA). The enactment of the legislation would be considered a win for employers who shop for health care plans.
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“As a Main Street Entrepreneur who provided quality healthcare to my employees, this legislation will give Americans the chance to see the true costs of their healthcare visits, which will increase competition and lower health care costs,” Braun said in a statement introducing the bill. “President Trump has been the leader on healthcare reform and this legislation takes his executive orders and makes it the law of the land, which is a win for all Americans.”
Critics of the legislation, such as the American Hospital Association, say it would place a burden on already beleaguered healthcare systems responding to the COVID-19 crisis. The AHA and other healthcare groups recently lost a court challenge seeking to stop the rule and have filed an appeal.
In a letter to the Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the hospital associations from 34 states urged the federal government to delay the implementation of the legislation.
“While we disagree with the agency on the value of public disclosure of negotiated rate information (as opposed to estimated out-of-pocket costs), we hope that you will agree that advancing this policy is not essential at this moment,” the associations wrote. “Even attempting to comply with the rule will require a significant diversion of financial resources and staff time that hospitals and health systems cannot afford to spare as they prepare to or care for patients with COVID-19.”
They continued, “Asking information technology and clinical care departments to refocus their efforts at this juncture is, at best, unwise, as the past week has demonstrated that significant new outbreaks of the virus can occur in locations that were previously unaffected or had very few cases.”
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