Hacker News Reader

Comment by txcwpalpha | Hacker News Reader

I take issue with this headline. Hospital prices are already, by law, public in the US. The new rule makes it required to post them online, whereas previously you might have to call/email the hospital to get the price list rather than looking at their website.

This is an important distinction, IMO, because I have seen people saying that this is an important step because "insurance/patients can now negotiate easier with a set price list". The issue with this is that, like mentioned above, the public has already had access to these price lists, so this new rule changes nothing in that regard.

The new rule might make it easier for insurance companies or those collecting pricing information to scrape the price data from the hospitals' websites, which is a good thing, but overall I think this new rule is being overblown in terms of the actual impact it will have.

View on HN

If the only access you have to a price list is through a private comms channel, what guarantee do you have that you are receiving the same prices and service for a given price as someone else?

If the prices were available through a centralized third party (government health agency or similar) then sure, it's not much of a difference, but if the only way before was by directly contacting the hospitals, then it being available online is a big difference in the actual "public" nature of the information.

Also, calling or writing snail mail to multiple individual hospitals for price lists is a barrier in 2018 that not only dissuades, but is possibly physically not viable for affected people.

In my opinion, being posted online is rightfully the baseline for information to be considered "publicly available" (but probably not sufficient) today.

My heuristic is if you can't find out a piece of information by visiting a public library within 5-10 minutes, it's not public information.

There's nothing in this ruling that requires the price list, even online, to fit within your heuristic.

The hospital could choose to place the price list at a url of blahblahhospital dot com / 3424kjfksm34. And to get that URL, you have to call the hospital and ask for it. There is nothing in the rule going into effect on Jan 1 that says they have to plaster the price list on their front page or on Google.

For that matter, they still could give separate price lists to different parties, as long as said price lists are 'online' (eg price list for you is at our_prices dot html, whereas someone else's price list is at our_other_prices dot html).

And, beyond all of this, is the fact that even if you do get access to the price list, it is meaningless to you as a patient. The article discusses this. As a patient, if you want to know an actual realistic estimate of your costs, the only way to get that is to call/go into the hospital and ask, or to go through your insurance company estimator, both of which are already available and aren't changed by this new ruling.

Your points are all legitimate and ones I agree with, but I just don't think this new HHS rule does anything to meaningfully address them.

Not really at this scale. I work for a health care non profit. Medicare has set prices they will pay and the consumer can get estimates for some general procedures but nothing like this. We are going from price estimates for many procedures to a twenty thousand CSV list published online.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com