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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I would advocate a more direct form of damages: a hospital that does not comply may not charge more than the minimum over all hospitals in a 500 mile radius for any procedure. A hospital that does charge more and is caught must refund double the difference. Furthermore, no contractual provision may penalize patients for attempting to seek that double refund, and a class action lawsuit to recover the difference that actually goes to trial recovers triple instead.

Hospitals will comply immediately :)

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How about if you can’t post the prices, you simply aren’t allowed to bill for any services?

This is the one that's simple to enforce. No price, no bill.

Y'all are leaving out the no service part that would come with that.

No service = no bonus for whatever exec decided not to publish the list.

In general, I’d love to see the same consumer protection required from auto shops applied to a hospital. An auto shop must give an estimate in advance.

Wut? The service has already been rendered at that point. Without an upfront price, no contract has been formed, so there's no basis for the hospital to bill an unjustifiable amount. At best they could request reimbursement for cost incurred. eg $0.01 for an aspirin and not $60.

At which point? The hospital would stop providing services shortly after it was informed that it would not be able to bill for them.

Also, I'm pretty sure you can write a contract that doesn't have an upfront price.

Informed by who? Hospital performs services, sends out a "bill" 30 days later, patient responds "due to the lack of published pricing as per federal reguation, no contract was formed and thus this bill is invalid". Are you saying the hospital would then react by stopping providing care to all patients from then on? Why wouldn't they react by you know, complying with the law to stay in business?

A contract has to have defined consideration, otherwise it is not a contract. Time and materials (hourly rate + cost/plus) is another standard form of financial consideration, but "we'll charge you whatever we feel like at some later time" is not.

The only reason these laws have any teeth is medicare/medicaid reimbursements.

If you make working with the govt on reimbursements too painful, many hospitals in well-off insured areas (good payer mix which is like gold to medicine) will just stop treating medicare/medicaid.

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