Service providers don’t want to say what that surgery will cost you

You would think that making the prices charged by hospitals and doctors available to their patients would be a no-brainer. After all, we’ve become accustomed to knowing the price we pay for cars, carrots, comic books and almost everything else we buy. Why not knee surgery or appendectomies?

The medical establishment, it seems, isn’t keen on letting the public in on what health practitioners charge for their services. Despite lots of talk about price transparency from government officials, including the Trump administration, the actions of hospitals and physicians speak otherwise.

“Price secrecy is a calculated strategy,” says Jeanne Pinder, founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts, a digital startup that works with news outlets to disclose the costs of medical care. “All that money collected from overpriced care and mysterious bills goes into lobbying and behind the scenes pressure. They lobby lawmakers and regulators to protect the current system and to skew it even further to their benefit.”

That’s what has happened in Ohio where the hospital industry and its lobbyists have succeeded in killing two laws passed by the state legislature, the first in 2015 and the second this summer, that would have allowed patients to know the prices of the medical procedures and services they were about to receive.

The 2015 law would have required hospitals and other health care providers to give patients an estimate of their costs no later than the same day a procedure or medical intervention would take place. The hospitals objected. The governor’s office never wrote rules to implement the law, and hospitals and other health care groups sued to prevent implementation.

The law was passed as part of the worker’s compensation budget bill, and the medical industry argued that it violated the state prohibition on including multiple subjects in one bill. A lower court judge sided with the hospitals. The matter is now before the Ohio Court of Appeals and likely to go to the state supreme court.

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