Senator Braun leads hearing on reducing health care prices through full transparency

Senator Braun led a hearing on reducing health care costs through price transparency in the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging on Thursday, entitled “Health Care Transparency: Lowering Costs and Empowering Patients.” 

During the hearing, the Senators focused on challenges in the current health care system due to a lack of price transparency and competition, as well as ways to improve the system for patients, people with disabilities, older adults, and families. 

The hearing examined examples of how patients and plan beneficiaries were harmed by poor transparency and how unions and employers have found ways to amass incredible savings by acting on data. 

Senator Braun also released a report today on health care price transparency. You can read it online here. 

Senator Braun’s Health Care PRICE Transparency Act continues to add bipartisan cosponsors. The bill would require machine-readable files of all negotiated rates and cash prices between plans and providers, not estimates, expand price transparency requirements to clinical diagnostic labs, imaging centers, and ambulatory surgical centers, require pricing data standards including all billing codes for services, require actual prices for 300 shoppable services with all services by 2025, require attestation by executives that all prices are accurate and complete, increase maximum annual penalties to $10,000,000 (includes specific minimum and maximum penalties according to number of hospital beds in the facility), prevent preemption of state price transparency laws, except for ERISA group health plans, codify the Transparency in Coverage rule, provide group health plans the right to access, audit, and review claims encounter data.