New Federal Law on Hospital Prices May Cause Confusion

A new federal law increasing transparency of hospital pricing went into effect Tuesday.

Steve Ramey is the Chief Financial Officer at Cookeville Regional Medical Center. He says the new law may actually create more confusion.

“They’re trying to make it easier for patients to understand. That’s the goal of the plan,” Ramey says. “I don’t think that this transparency is really going to get you there because they’re asking us to publish our entire charge master. People who are good at databases will be able to use it effectively, but the average person in the public will not be able to.”

Ramey says patients looking for things that fit their needs exactly may have a difficult time doing so.

“What they’re expecting is that people have a database-type program that can extract the information,” Ramey says. “We either have to put it in an Excel file or a comma-separated file. So it’s really being designed for someone with the knowledge and the know-how to sift through all the data.”

Ramey says the new transparency law won’t make predicting potential hospital bills easier as it will all still be priced on a case-by-case basis.

“The challenge you’re going to have is that even if you’re able to do all of that, you still won’t know exactly how one hospital compares to another hospital based completely on pricing because you would have to know everything that goes into each procedure,” Ramey says. “They’ll have multiple charges on one bill. That’s what makes it complicated. About the only thing that will really be practical to the public that they could use is room rates.”

CRMC has a list available on their website listing prices for various services, items, and procedures offered at the hospital.