Price Transparency
Hospitals and health systems are committed to empowering patients and their families with all the information they need to live their healthiest lives. This includes ensuring they have access to accurate and timely price information when seeking care. Hospitals and health systems have made important progress in adopting federal price transparency requirements that require they both publicly post machine-readable files of a wide range of rate information and provide more consumer-friendly displays of pricing information for at least 300 shoppable services.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Price Transparency final rule goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2021. The AHA and three other national organizations sued the federal government challenging the final rule. The case is pending in a federal appeals court.
The AHA writes in support of S.J.Res. 91, a joint resolution for congressional disapproval of a rule relating to "Medicare and Medicaid Programs; Minimum Staffing Standards for Long-Term Care Facilities and Medicaid Institutional Payment Transparency Reporting."
The Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC) June 11 released its June report to Congress. The first chapter focuses on improving the transparency of financing the non-federal share of Medicaid and CHIP.
A blog expanding on AHA's initial response last week to the RAND Corporation's latest hospital pricing report notes, "The AHA has previously highlighted significant flaws with older versions of this report, and this latest iteration not only recycles but doubles down on those serious shortcomings…
The RAND Corporation recently released the fifth iteration of its biannual hospital price report. The AHA highlights the significant flaws in this latest iteration.
In what is becoming an all too familiar pattern, the RAND Corporation’s latest hospital price report oversells and underwhelms. Their analysis — which despite much heralded data expansions — still represents less than 2% of overall hospital spending. This offers a skewed and incomplete picture of…
AHA expects the release of a new price transparency report next week. See AHA resources to prepare your organization’s response to the study findings.
On April 11th, 2024 Dr. Terri Postma, M.D., medical officer and senior advisor at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, discussed the changes to requirements for hospital price transparency and machine-readable format, and presented real-world examples of how to encode data for…
CMS March 28 released an updated online validator tool that hospitals can use to test price transparency machine-readable files against the new format and data specifications going into effect on July 1, 2024, and Jan. 1, 2025.
The AHA shares comments on the topic of national health expenditures before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health .