Negotiated hospital rates paid by people with insurance tend to be lower than the cash prices paid by people without insurance only a little over half the time in the country, according to a study by researchers at John Hopkins University.
The study, published April 3 in Health Affairs, examined hospital prices for 70 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services-designated services disclosed by 2,739 hospitals using data from September 2022. The CMS hospital price transparency rule mandated all providers to publicly disclose their prices for all services after Jan. 1, 2021, to encourage price competition and improve access to and ...