Since January 1, 2021, hospitals have been required to make prices available to patients for various procedures, but a recent Biden Administration regulation finalized earlier this month will help Health Care Sharing  members, and other patients everywhere, to find and use those prices in the future. Cost transparency may be new to some patients and medical professionals, but seeking transparency is nothing out of the ordinary for members of Health Care Sharing

There are more than a million and a half members of Health Care Sharing , according to data from the Alliance of Health Care Sharing  The Alliance is dedicated to protecting and preserving the rights of their members, and people  in general, to engage in healthcare sharing as a viable solution for managing their medical expenses. Some Health Sharing systematically and aggressively negotiate medical bills down on behalf of their members—often obtaining for patients prices significantly lower than those associated with commercial insurance. Others coach their members how to get the lowest price from providers directly by using discounted cash prices. Others encourage cost-saving care arrangements such as direct primary care or bundled surgeries or maternity packages. Many Health Care Sharing  have been on their own for decades in identifying and using pricing data to help their members get the best prices for health care. Given how few hospitals were actually complying with the new requirements—as few as 1 in 20—

“For decades, Health Care Sharing  have helped their members navigate to higher-quality, lower-cost sites of care—that’s nothing new for us,”“Our members rely on each other to seek this highest-value care because they are communities of faith accountable to one another to stretch their charitable giving as far as possible.

Now, with the recently announced beefed-up enforcement of the federal hospital price transparency requirements, we are eager to expand our strategic partnerships to include more and more price-transparent doctors and hospitals.

“The Biden Administration’s proposed improvements to the price transparency enforcement program will put the kibosh on a number of games that hospitals have played to prevent patients, employers, aggregators and app developers from finding their price data, including blocking full electronic access, imposing barriers to inhibit search engines from finding the data files, burying the files under a mountain of clicks and navigation, and so forth. The final rule also smacks down the outrageous behavior by hospitals to make it nearly impossible to get info on ‘shoppable’ services through an out-of-pocket estimator tool, by allowing queries only to users who input burdensome, often personally identifiable data in order to see the price estimate. They also return ‘estimated price ranges’ in their estimator tools instead of the actual price. The Alliance celebrates these pro-patient proposals that will help make secret health care prices a relic of the past.”

“The penalty for hospitals not complying with the hospital price transparency rule will now be as high as $2 million a year—which honestly should be raised even higher—but it’s a welcome improvement. For many years, health care reform was a partisan issue. Ending secret prices is so overwhelmingly popular that it’s no longer a question of Republicans versus Democrats—it’s about the health care industry special interests versus the rest of us.”