Pennsylvania lawmakers consider hospital price transparency bill

By HPN Staff

A Republican state senator in Pennsylvania introduced a hospital price transparency bill this year, in an effort to help bolster consumer choice and reduce the costs of healthcare in that state

Senate Bill 752, sponsored by Sen. Dawn Keefer (R-31), would require hospitals to maintain a list of standard charges for services and items on their website that is free of charge, easily accessible, clearly displayed in U.S. dollars and regularly updated. It would also require a similar list to be displayed of a more limited number of “shoppable services”, defined as those which “may be scheduled by an individual in advance”, extend the requirements to include hospital-owned facilities and establish civil penalties for violations. 

A second part of the bill would prohibit hospitals that are not in compliance from collecting debts. 

Why it matters

Hospital price transparency, the disclosure of prices for common services and treatments offered by hospitals, is seen by many as a critical tool for the control of health care costs by providing greater consumer choice and encouraging shopping for services. The intention is to increase competition and impose a measure of market discipline on hospitals and other healthcare providers. Such transparency rules include not only the disclosure of prices for services, but any attendant “facility fees”, which are often added to hospital bills to cover facility upkeep costs.

While the Pennsylvania bill has broad bipartisan support, drawing both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, some progressive groups are calling for the bill to go further and ban the charging of facility fees altogether.

The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a progressive think tank, said in an article on its website that it “would like to see the legislature go further. Pennsylvanians deserve a complete ban on facility fees that are needlessly increasing the cost of basic care.”

The American Hospital Association, while supportive of price transparency efforts, says that facility fees “provide hospitals with the resources necessary to make available the high-acuity services only they can provide on a 24/7 basis, such as emergency and trauma care.” It further states that “Facility fees are increasingly used to cover the true cost of providing physician services, which hospitals do by subsidizing physicians’ pay above the underpayment that they are reimbursed from both public and private payers.”

The big picture

In February, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing the Departments of the Treasury, Labor and Health and Human Services to fully implement and enforce healthcare price transparency rules established during his first term, in 2019.  

However, a report released in July by the Pennsylvania Health Access Network said that more than half of the states’ hospitals were not in compliance with the federal price transparency rules, which in part prompted Sen. Keefer’s bill.