How Are Hospitals Posting Their Prices, and Is It Helpful?
By Admin | January 09, 2019
The Public Health Act was enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act, which requires hospitals to make a public list of the hospital’s standard charges starting this year, but the posted price doesn’t tell the full story. Insurance, a person’s health, and the negotiated rate between insurers and providers complicates the out-of-pocket payment, the posted prices might not mean much to the average consumer.
President and CEO of the DFW Hospital Council W. Stephen Love says the council’s member hospitals support transparency, but warn to proceed with caution. “We support transparency and want people to make informed decisions,” he says. “But it is very complex, and the healthcare billing process is extremely complicated. There are different rates for different insurance plans. Medicare pays a certain rate; Medicaid, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield all pay different rates.”
“It’s good to have a transparent starting point so people can make good informed decisions,” Love says. “Overall, providers support transparency and want to do right by people. But it is very complicated, and we may need to work with you so you make a good decision.”
But if patients wanted to attempt to shop around for prices, they need to be able to find where the hospitals are posting said information. The prices have to be “machine-readable,” which means easily inputed into a computer program, but that sometimes means it isn’t particularly useful for the lay person to understand the document. While some places had detailed descriptions, most of the prices read as vague medical terms that the average consumer would be hard-pressed to understand.In the hospital world, this list of procedures and prices is called the “Chargemaster.”
For more information, please read How Are Hospitals Posting Their Prices, and Is It Helpful? by DCEO Healthcare.
