The Patient Rights Advocate (PRA) released its seventh Semi-Annual Hospital Price Transparency report, which examines 2,000 hospitals’ compliance with the Hospital Price Transparency Rule.
The report revealed that just 29% of hospitals in Florida fully comply with the federal rule, which took effect nearly four years ago.
Despite recent polls revealing that 98% of Americans support healthcare price transparency, this new report found that compliance in Florida is down from 41% among hospitals, as reported in the last report, released in February. Only 39 of 135 Florida hospitals reviewed were fully complying with the rule (29%).
“Unfortunately, our seventh Hospital Price Transparency Compliance Report reveals that after nearly four years, the overwhelming majority of hospitals reviewed are still not complying with the rule requiring them to publish their discounted cash prices and all negotiated rates. By keeping their prices hidden, hospitals continue to block American consumers from their right to compare prices and protect themselves from overcharges,” said PRA Founder and Chairman Cynthia Fisher.
Making matters worse, CMS recently lowered transparency standards, which created the illusion that many hospitals made strides in consumer protection. However, the new standards included the option to omit actual dollars-and-cents prices. Because of this, in this new report, PRA also assessed each hospital’s “Pricing Data Sufficiency” based on the availability of actual prices found in the files. This is essentially a commonsense evaluation since consumers need real prices to determine actual costs.
Key Findings:
- Only 39 of 135 Florida hospitals reviewed fully complied with the rule (29%).
- Only 421 (21.1%) hospitals fully complyed with the rule.
- Only 335 (16.8%) hospitals were found to be sufficient in their disclosure of dollars-and-cents prices.
- Only 133 (6.7%) hospitals were found to be both fully complying and posting sufficient pricing data.
- Most hospitals — 1,579 (78.9%) — were found in total noncompliance, failing to pass the CMS Validator Tool, not following the CMS-mandated file name format, and missing significant pricing data by payer and plan names or not posting a compliant TXT file.
Hospital systems with the highest compliance rate (fully compliant):
- 78% of hospitals owned by Christus Health
- 58% of hospitals owned by Baylor Cott & White
- 56% of hospitals owned by HCA Health
Compliance and pricing sufficiency varied widely among the largest hospital systems:
- 56% of hospitals owned by HCA Healthcare were found to be fully compliant, but none (0%) of them met our price sufficiency rating.
- 45% of hospitals owned by CommonSpiritHealth and were found to be fully compliant, but only 32% of them met our price sufficiency rating.
- None (0%) of the hospitals owned by Ascension, AdventHealth, Kaiser Permanente, Bon Secours Mercy, and Mercy were found to be fully compliant.
The hospital systems with the highest number of hospitals meeting PRA’s price sufficiency rating were: Prime Healthcare (90%), Baylor Scott & White (68%), and Sanford Health (59%).
449 hospitals exhibited ‘backsliding,’ with an assessment of “Noncompliant” in the current report after being assessed as “Compliant” in PRA’s February report.
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