Everybody likes surprises, right? Wrong! Obviously, there are a lot of good surprises in life, but when the surprise involves bad news, it’s not nearly as fun. Take a surprise medical bill, for instance. When a health plan member does everything he or she can to follow the rules, like visiting in-network facilities and getting any required pre-authorizations before a procedure, it’s easy to see why the member would be unhappy when a “surprise bill” shows up in the mail.

In a recent AHCP blog post, we explained that a hospital price transparency law that went into effect January 1 of this year really does very little to help consumers better understand the cost of medical care. Instead, it simply requires hospitals to post their chargemaster data in a machine-readable format on its website. We finished the post by saying that “only time will tell how impactful this particular rule will be, but the movement towards transparency is a step in the right direction.”

A recent article from Health Leaders Media summarizes the results of a global study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Here are a few of the findings:

A new rule intended to increase price transparency went into effect January 1st of this year. The rule, issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on August 2, 2018, requires “hospitals to make publicly available a list of their standard charges or their policies for allowing the public to view this list upon request…on the Internet in a machine-readable format.”

In 2019, some of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies, after holding prices steady for much of 2018, announced they are raising the cost on hundreds of drugs. You probably saw some of the headlines.