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: