What is the Hospital Price Transparency rule?
Healthcare costs some of the most significant expenses in our lives have historically been unknown and unavailable to consumers until the bill arrived. With the Hospital Price Transparency Rule, instituted on January 1, 2021, you ll be able to see more costs ahead of time.
There are two phases to the rule. Phase one requires hospitals to publish their prices online. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Hospitals must post standard charges for at least 300 shoppable services that can be planned in advance, such as x-rays, outpatient visits, imaging and laboratory tests or bundled services such as a colonoscopy. Hospitals will be charged a penalty of $300 a day for noncompliance.
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
On December 29, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued its opinion in American Hospital Association v. Azar (the Opinion) upholding the Hospital Transparency Regulation (the Rule) issued by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Opinion paved the way for the Rule to become effective as scheduled on January 1, 2021.
The Rule, part of an initiative to increase the transparency of health care pricing, requires hospitals to make public in a machine-readable form five categories of standard charges for all hospital items and services. These categories are:
the charge master list of gross charges;
Friday, January 8, 2021
This Week’s Dose
The 116th Congress came to an end with passage of coronavirus (COVID-19) relief and government funding legislation, and the 117th Congress was sworn in. With victories in two Georgia runoff elections, Democrats will take control of the Senate, giving President-elect Joe Biden unified, albeit extremely narrow control of Congress. The House and Senate certified Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Congress
The 117th Congress Convened with Narrow Democratic Control of Both Chambers. Newly elected members were sworn in on January 3, kicking off the 117th Congress. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was reelected to her post as Speaker of the House of Representatives with the closest vote in recent history, underscoring the razor thin margin with which Democrats control the chamber. In Georgia, Democratic candidates for Senate Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff narrowly defeated Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, giving