Maribeth Guarino, a healthcare advocate with the US PIRG Education Fund, said patients should be able to get an accurate look at what the price of care is before they see a doctor.
It is why she wrote PIRG’s “Post the Price” report.
“Patients, as consumers, have a lot of power over purse strings and the power of the consumer to decide where to spend their healthcare dollars,” Guarino said. “But they can’t do that if they don’t know the price.”
Since 2021, federal rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) require hospitals to make their prices public in two ways: a machine-readable file for researchers and a “consumer friendly” format as a price estimator.
PIRG found that, three years later, healthcare comparison shopping still isn’t easy.
“It’s iffy, honestly,” …