Trump administration warns more than 500 hospitals to provide more price information or face fines
FILE – President Donald Trump speaks with reporters at the White House. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has warned more than 500 hospitals that they are failing to provide the public with basic pricing information — arguing that the lack of disclosure is keeping healthcare costs higher than they should be.
The Associated Press obtained exclusively the list of hospitals that since April have either received letters of warning or, in more severe cases, requests to submit plans to provide transparent pricing.
Twenty Alabama hospitals are on the list. In our area, they include Bullock County Hospital in Union Springs and St. Vincent’s Chilton in Clanton. The Associated Press says both hospitals received requests to provide transparent pricing plans.
Failing to comply with the warnings comes with penalties as high as $2 million annually for each recipient that doesn’t create a plan to post clear pricing data.
The letters are meant to fix a fundamental problem that patients, employers and insurers might not know ahead of time the cost of blood work, an imaging test or another form of treatment, and as a result pay more than they should have. AP has posted the list of hospitals that have received letters.
A senior administration official who requested anonymity to provide the list said that President Trump plans to tighten enforcement of price transparency standards made possible by a 2019 executive order signed by Trump. More hospitals are likely to receive letters regarding the absence of pricing data, the official said.
The warnings are the latest example of Trump working to address the problem of healthcare expenses that can drain a family budget. However, his administration allowed subsidies to lapse for people buying insurance through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.
Just 29% of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s healthcare policies according to the most recent survey on the issue by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The president fared slightly worse on that issue in the December survey than on the economy, immigration or his management of the federal government.
Gary Claxton, senior vice president and the director of the program on the healthcare marketplace at KFF, said that the pricing data is more useful for benefit consultants and others in the sector with access to additional information than it would be for consumers. But he said that the standards in reporting pricing data can still create difficulty in making accurate comparisons about the costs and quality of the services being provided.
“There’s a pretty widespread belief that prices are more divergent than they should be in a competitive market — and this is one way of trying to understand that more,” Claxton said. “It’s moving in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean it has gotten to where it needs to be.”
The Trump administration has focused on trying to find ways to provide details on pricing — such as promoting the TrumpRx site for prescription drugs — betting that doing so will lead to better and more efficient spending on healthcare as the data gets crunched.
Critics have said Trump’s negotiated prices on prescription drugs might not produce genuine savings for many Americans with insurance, while the administration has estimated savings in excess of $500 billion over 10 years.
With the various lists of hospital prices, the administration wants providers to make it easier to access the files and to ensure the information in them is legitimate, instead of being based on estimates or omitting numbers for key procedures.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has a hearing planned for Wednesday on price transparency.
“Transparency is the foundation of a healthcare system that rewards competition based on cost and quality,” Shawn Gremminger, CEO of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, plans to say in his prepared remarks.
LIST OF ALABAMA HOSPITALS WARNED ABOUT PRICING TRANSPARANCY
- Baypointe Behavioral Health – Mobile
- Bullock County Hospital – Union Springs
- DCH Regional Medical Center – Tuscaloosa
- Decatur Morgan Hospital – Decatur
- Eastpointe Hospital – Daphne
- Grandview Medical Center – Birmingham
- Grove Hill Memorial Hospital – Grove Hill
- Marion Regional Health – Winfield
- Marshall Medical Center – Guntersville
- Marshall Medical Center South – Boaz
- Monroe County Hospital – Monroeville
- Noland Hospital Birmingham – Birmingham
- Noland Hospital Dothan – Dothan
- Noland Hospital Tuscaloosa – Tuscaloosa
- St Vincent’s St. Clair – Pell City
- St. Vincent’s Birmingham – Birmingham
- St. Vincent’s Blount – Oneonta
- St. Vincent’s Chilton – Clanton
- St. Vincent’s East – Birmingham
- Thomas Hospital – Fairhope
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