Hospitals Need To Face Consequences for Hiding Prices From Patients and Practitioners

quote:

---

Hospitals Face No Consequences for Hiding Prices
By Justin Leventhal
June 09, 2026

Imagine leaving a hospital with your newborn child only to learn your bill was $24,000 more than what it would have been at another hospital in the same area. This is the reality for some patients in the San Francisco area—and it is not unique. Across the country, identical procedures have wildly different prices depending on where patients receive care, and patients have almost no way of knowing those prices in advance. Federal transparency rules exist, but their penalties are minimal and rarely enforced.

Without meaningful price transparency, patients cannot comparison shop for care in any practical sense. Prices are hidden, inconsistent, and often unknowable until after treatment, forcing patients to make decisions without the most basic market signal: cost. In that environment, providers face little pressure to compete, allowing wide—and often arbitrary—price variation for identical services. Those inflated and opaque prices don’t stay contained; they feed directly into higher insurance premiums and larger out-of-pocket costs, ultimately shifting the burden onto patients.
...

Congress can fix both problems. First, it should codify transparency requirements into statute rather than leaving them vulnerable to executive action. Second, it should impose meaningful penalties tied to hospital revenue or assessed per-violation, per-day. As long as penalties remain capped at insignificant levels, hospitals will continue to ignore them. Finally, CMS should condition eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid funds on demonstrated compliance with transparency rules. Together, these reforms would greatly increase hospitals’ incentives to comply.

Until these gaps are closed, hospital price transparency will remain more promise than reality. Presidents of both parties have pushed for greater transparency; now Congress must make it enforceable. That means codifying the rules and imposing penalties that matter. Without those changes, hospitals will continue to treat transparency as optional—and patients will continue to pay the price.

LINK

---