Health care costs in the U.S. continue to grow year after year, leaving Americans with more and more debt. According to Credit Karma data provided to Yahoo Finance, roughly 21 million Americans holding $46 billion of medical debt as of April 2021 face collections — meaning that a third-party debt collector is trying to obtain the money owed.
U.S. hospitals have been required to make their prices public since 2019, but 18 months into the rule more than half weren't doing it, a new study finds. In 2018, the Trump administration issued a rule requiring hospitals to publish their "chargemasters" on their websites.
For years, patients have had a serious, very valid complaint about our health care system: It’s nearly impossible to know how much treatment actually costs. That’s why hospitals began posting their prices online in January, thanks to the Transparency in Coverage rule — a policy enacted by the Trump administration. Seema Verma, the then-administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, proclaimed that the rule would “usher in a new era that upends the status quo to empower patients and put them first.”
Taken together, the hospital and surgeon billed Gottlieb more than $700,000. The hospital billed $445,995 for the surgery, an amount reduced by Geico to $103,778. Bergen Pain Management billed an additional $264,444 for the main surgeon.
By letter dated April 13, 2021 (Letter), the Democrat and Republican leadership of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Health, wrote United States Health and Human Services Secretary, Xavier Becerra, urging HHS to provide robust oversight and enforcement of the Hospital Price Transparency Rule (Rule).
Federal regulators said healthcare pricing data that health insurers must post under a new requirement shouldn’t be blocked from web searches, issuing new guidance after The Wall Street Journal reported that hospitals used special coding that shielded such information from Google and other search engines.