Hospitals across Virginia are now required to post the price of procedures online due to a new state law that took effect on Saturday.
The law focuses on price transparency, forcing every hospital to post information about “standard charges for items and services provided” on their websites.
“Like anything else, we should be able to know the price we pay,” said Del. Dan Helmer, a state lawmaker who helped get the law passed.
“It’s very important because it allows you to figure out what the cost of care is between different facilities,” Helmer said.
Helmer argued that a state law was needed because many hospitals were not complying with a federal rule that already required hospitals to have price transparency.
Helmer said the Virginia law tells hospitals that “you’ve got to do what the feds have already said you’ve got to do.”
“It will help us ultimately control the cost of health care and increase access,” Helmer said.
Hospitals in Virginia that ignore the rules surrounding price transparency can potentially face fines from the state.
The nonprofit group “PatientRightsAdvocate.org” released a national map showing which hospitals in which states are in full compliance of the federal price transparency rule.
Some hospitals are listed as being in partial compliance, but they fall short in certain areas, such as failing “to adequately identify specific plans for all commercial payers.”
After analyzing the websites of 2,000 U.S. hospitals, PatientRightsAdvocate.org found that only 24.5% of them were complaint with all the requirements of the federal rule.
“Though the majority of hospitals have posted files, the wide scale noncompliance of 75.5% of hospitals is due to most hospitals’ files being incomplete, illegible, or not having prices clearly associated with both payer and plan,” the group said.
The federal price transparency rule was implemented on Jan. 1, 2021, requiring hospitals to post all prices online in a way that is easily accessible and searchable.
