Insurer price transparency has arrived: The law mandating that health insurers must publicly post prices they have negotiated for almost all procedures and items with hospitals, doctors and other suppliers went into effect July 1, 2022. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wrote on the web that the move was “empowering consumers with the […]
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Despite transparency laws, we couldn’t find reliable prices at New York City’s public hospitals
Since Jan. 1, 2021, U.S. hospitals are required by law to publicly post their prices online. But for some it has been impossible to find them or confirm their accuracy. New York City Health + Hospitals is the corporation that manages the city’s 11 public hospitals. For a research project, we set out to find […]
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Hospital price transparency, again: The Jan. 1, 2021, disclosure rule, examined
The administration’s health price transparency rule went live Jan. 1. Already, President Donald Trump is declaring victory. But did it work? Are hospitals complying? Does it matter for patients? Describing the new rules, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say on their website: “Starting January 1, 2021, each hospital operating in the United States […]
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The new hospital price transparency rule and the details: Implementation, explanation, hitches and so on
The administration’s health price transparency rule went live Jan. 1. We’ve been seeking out and assessing the results; you can find our previous blog posts with that reporting here and here. This post will go into some of the more obscure and messy points of the mandate, including hurdles to implementation, enforcement, definition and so […]
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The new hospital transparency rule: The deadline for posting price lists is on Jan. 1, so how did they do?
The new federal price transparency law is rolling out Jan. 1, 2021, mandating that hospitals have to list prices on their web sites. Describing the new rules, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services say on their website: “Hospital price transparency helps Americans know the cost of a hospital item or service before receiving it. […]
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Hospital transparency data: Not a good story
We have been digging through the hospital transparency data that hospitals were ordered to make public Jan. 1, 2021. It’s not a pretty story — now more than a year and a half later. Many hospitals in the New York area are completely out of compliance with the law. Others are nominally compliant, making files […]
Our WNYC-Gothamist partnership
We launched our new partnership with WNYC and Gothamist in November 2019, under the name “#PriceCheckNYC,” with funding from the New York State Health Foundation. In March 2020, we pivoted to reporting on the Covid pandemic sweeping the nation. The year-long partnership ended in November 2020. Our work was featured on the Gothamist.com home page, […]
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Long Covid has many faces: What is it anyway? Some taxonomies of the illness.
It’s been a puzzle since the beginning: What is long Covid anyway? Who has it and who doesn’t? At the beginning of the pandemic, people who didn’t die or get well right away were relegated to some “not really” status – people (including doctors and spouses) refused to believe that they hadn’t gotten well. Friends […]
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Hospitals now have to post price lists. Does that mean instant transparency? Uh, no.
(Editors note 2022: This 2018 blog post was written as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services instituted a rule for hospital price transparency, to take effect on Jan. 1, 2019. Since then, CMS has made more hospital price transparency rules, meaning that this post was overtaken by events, and most of the links to […]
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Medicare head asks Twitter to help enforce price transparency policy
Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, called on Twitter a few days ago to help her enforce a new rule on health price transparency. The rule requires hospitals to post their list prices online. It went into effect on Jan. 1, and there was scant information about how it […]
