Workshop: Reporting on hospital prices to empower consumers and readers
By Sarah Volpenhein, Wisconsin Health Journalism Fellow
An HJ25 panel highlighted the role that hospital prices play in rising health care costs and how reporters can use now-available price data to help patients make better decisions about their care.
Since 2021, hospitals have been required to disclose the cash prices they charge for tests, procedures and other medical services, as well as the prices they negotiate with individual insurance companies for services.
Those prices were previously unavailable to the public, even though they provide key insights into rising health care costs in the United States.
The prices that hospitals charge patients vary widely from place to place, and even within the same city. The price of a procedure can even differ within the same hospital, depending on a patient’s insurance plan, said Meg Wingerter, a health reporter at The Denver Post.
“When you can get these prices and show how much they vary, that’s concrete information for your readers,” she said.
High market concentration among hospitals causes many inflated hospital prices, said Roslyn Murray, Ph.D., assistant professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health.
When hospitals merge or buy up other hospitals and physician practices, they create large health systems with more leverage to exact higher prices during contract negotiations with health insurers and employers, she said.
“We’re not getting better quality care (in general) as a result of these high prices,” she said. “Rather, we’re just getting hit with greater financial burdens through higher premiums, higher deductibles and even job losses.”
Not all hospitals are complying with the rule requiring them to disclose prices, said Patricia Kelmar, J.D., senior director of health care campaigns at PIRG, a consumer advocacy group.
Reporters can check if area hospitals are following the rule. Hospitals are required to make prices public in a digital file, such as a spreadsheet, and to link to the file in their website’s footer with the label “Price Transparency.”
Hospitals are also required to display prices in a user-friendly way, such as an online price estimator tool that must be accessible without registration. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is responsible for overseeing compliance. Outside groups, such as data company Turquoise Health and advocacy group PatientRightsAdvocate.org, also assess whether individual hospitals are measuring up using additional criteria beyond the law, Wingerter said.
Reporters can cover hospital prices by highlighting personal experiences, such as patients trying to challenge their hospital bills, or figure out the price of a planned procedure or visit, Wingerter said.
When assessing costs, she recommended double-checking estimates with a patient’s insurer and getting those estimates in writing.
It’s more challenging to compare prices across hospitals, she said. In that case, reporters need to make sure they are comparing procedures with the same billing, or CPT, code.
Sarah Volpenhein is a health care reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
