A state lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require hospitals to publish cost reports on their website, the latest in an ongoing struggle to boost price transparency for patients.
Assembly Member David Weprin, a Richmond Hill Democrat, introduced a bill this month that would mandate hospitals post the institutional reports it submits to the federal government with information on finances, utilization data and costs. The bill is the latest salvo in ongoing calls for notoriously opaque hospitals to reveal more about their price structures.
Hospitals are required to submit institutional cost reports to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which sends billions of dollars to facilities each year. The legislation would require hospitals to make these reports public on their websites.
The bill is one of many steps politicians have taken in recent years to get hospital pricing into the light. The most recent is by President Donald Trump in a February executive order to CMS to crack down on facilities that violate the rule from his first term that requires hospitals to post prices conspicuously for patients. In New York, just 44% of hospitals were in full compliance, according to Turquoise Health, a San Diego-based research company focused on price transparency efforts.
There is a patchwork of efforts in New York to get hospitals to be more transparent. One decade-old effort to publish a database of medical claims from government and private insurers has been held up by bureaucratic roadblocks since a $168 million contract to build the tool was first awarded to Optum, a branch of UnitedHealthcare, in 2016.
Weprin’s bill does not appear to have a senate companion, which is needed to advance the legislation to the governor’s desk. It does have the support of Local Business Relief Coalition, an advocacy group of New York business trade associations, which said the legislation would help business owners lower the cost of paying employee health benefits.
