New Investigative Reporting Shows Hospitals Hiding Prices in More Ways Than One

Hospital compliance with the new price transparency rule that took effect at the beginning of the year has been poor. Price lists are often confusing, consist of mere estimates, and don't represent all-in prices. According to research published in Health Affairs, two-thirds of large hospitals are non-compliant. Tourquoise Health ranks nearly half of hospitals nationwide at a compliance score of three out of five or lower. 

Now the Wall Street Journal reports that many hospitals are actively hiding their limited price data from consumers by inserting website code that prevents it from being picked up by search engines. Reports the Journal: 

[H]undreds of hospitals embedded code in their websites that prevented Google and other search engines from displaying pages with the price lists, according to the Journal examination of more than 3,100 sites...

To identify webpages hidden from search results, the Journal wrote a program that read the contents of 3,190 disclosure pages whose addresses were provided by Turquoise Health Co., a startup working with the price-transparency data. The program searched for a tag in the pages’ background coding that instructs search engines not to index the page.

The Journal found 164 webpages hosting disclosure files for 307 hospitals that contained versions of that blocking syntax. Some pages include information for more than one hospital within a system. The code was removed from pages with data for 182 hospitals after the Journal contacted their owners.

To recap: Hospitals have spent decades hiding prices so that they can charge patients far more than possible in a functional, competitive market. When finally required to post their prices, they have largely sidestepped the spirit, if not the letter, of the federal rule. And now, investigative reporting shows many hospitals are actively trying to hide the patchy data they are disclosing. Imagine if any other business treated their customers this way. 

These revelations further demonstrate why robust enforcement of the price transparency rule is desperately needed. Xavier Becerra, who was confirmed last week as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, has promised "robust enforcement" of the rule because "the American people are entitled to know what they're buying."

By properly enforcing the hospital rule, federal officials can empower healthcare consumers to finally control their healthcare spending, and signal to hospitals that their days of hiding prices -- in many different ways -- are over.