Bringing Greater Transparency to Health Care

For years now, Missouri lawmakers have been working to empower consumers in terms of their ability to make more informed decisions regarding their health care. One of the most effective ways to achieve this goal is to provide our citizens with more information about the costs of their medical treatment or procedures. These efforts to empower consumers led the Legislature to pass Senate Bill 608 this past session, to create the “Health Care Cost Reduction and Transparency Act.”

In virtually no other business sector do we buy and consume a product without first knowing the price. Yet as it stands today, most patients only learn of the costs of their medical treatment when they receive the bill, which is often weeks after they leave the hospital.  While there are certainly circumstances, such as immediate emergencies, where prior notification of the costs of procedures is not possible, the healthcare industry should be doing a much better job of providing consumers important information about scheduled treatments and procedures.

Under the Health Care Cost Reduction and Transparency Act, health care providers will be required to provide, upon a patient’s written request, a cost estimate of a particular health care service within three business days. In addition, beginning July 1, 2017, hospitals will be required to share with the public the costs of the 100 most common medical procedures.

By increasing the transparency of medical treatment costs, consumers will be better informed about the treatments being offered by health care providers and at what cost. This will naturally have the effect of forcing health care providers to compete for business — finally allowing our market economy to drive health care costs into more reasonable terrain.

Senate Bill 608 accomplishes two important goals at once. First, it arms consumers with the type of straightforward cost estimate information they need to make the best medical care decisions possible. Second, it promotes cost reduction through greater competition. I fully support this legislation, and I was proud to help my fellow lawmakers place this provision in law by overriding the governor’s veto of SB 608 in September.