For 17 years, Michelle Arroyo made everything he could to live his son after he was diagnosed with brain cancer at 6 years old. A California mother moved from Orange County to Los Angeles closer to the best doctors and medical facilities, opening his son around his childhood.
But despite his best efforts, the son of Arroyo, Groyson Arroyo-Smiley, died in 2023 in 22 years old, leaving Arroyo Mounting medical fees That taking, he said, millions. He also left with a feeling that he was deployed by health care companies to pay physical and emotional wishes for the best for his son.
“The process is greater,” said Arroyo, describing his experience in dealing with increasing bills and phone calls with insurance companies.
“It’s like going through it in the dark,” he said. “You don’t know what you get. If you try to save the life of a loved one, you don’t ask prices.”
If he knew about the prices ahead, Arroyo said, it would be better to make many decisions about care.
For many years, the federal government pushes for additional price transparency from hospitals. In 2019, in his first term, President Donald Trump signed a Executive Order The refers to the transparency price improvement by asking hospitals and advocates to expose health care care. As a result, the transparency’s threatening price threat made by 2021. The rule is made of mandatory for hospitals to post patterns to their websites.
Following, however, lacking: a study published by 2022 of Journal of the American Medical Association found that Fewer than 6% hospitals fully comply with rule. art 2024 reports From the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found under two-thirds of hospitals followed.
It has reached President Joe Biden Signing his own executive Order 2021 to restrict implementation by using hospitals without complying. If the order begins the following year, some hospitals continue to ignore the rules directly, while others accept the fine, wrapped in $ 5,500 a day.
Trump once again tried again to add to compliance. In late February, he signed an executive order Managing Treasury Departments, Labors, HHS to develop a plan over the next three months to implement Prover Transparency Rule.
Arroyo explained that if this kind of information was available to him, he could better handle financial healthcare needs of his or her sons.
“If prices have been posted for me,” he said, “Compare the prices I have taken against what others have taken. The fact that others take different prices, it’s not right.”
Arroyo estimates that in the last 10 years of his child’s life, gap of hundreds of thousands of medical supplies worth about $ 500 a month and falls outside of his insurance coverage. He recalls to take another medical bill for $ 1.5 million to less than 90 days in a five-month stay spent with his son in ICU. The fees, he said, seemed to be unfinished. Even if most of them were covered, he said, he always needed Deal with prices. Now, he said, he still pays $ 14,000 medical debt.
Because of his professional experience in negotiating real estate contracts, he was able to serve some services, but he asked how others could handle similar experience.
“If you don’t have information, how can you do it?”
Experts divided into transparency effectiveness
Trump’s orders believe that more transparency in health care prices will lead to increased competition for hospitals and advocates, which, raise costs for consumers.
“The bad news for hospitals charging rates higher than the markets they entered – this revision of Erisa represents great owners to represent their own health insurance.
“If the administration’s way of arriving, outliers reduce prices of more competition, can be billions of dollars in the next decade.
There are some evidence that has happened.
Ge Bai, a Professor of Accounting and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, knowing that costs from some hospitals fall in 2019 instruction of a New analysis From the turquoise health, a health care price platform.
Other public health experts, however, cautiously an executive order can only serve as a mirror bullet in Health Care Cost Transparency Challenges that makes the industry a lot of decades.
“I don’t think there’s any down, but I don’t think anyone is opposite,” says Gerard Anderson, a consuming consumers and complex as it is based on the average and “no one understands how it does.”
Almost 100 million Americans – or 1 of 4 adults – restricted to More than $ 220 billion In medical debt they cannot afford, according to the consumer financial protection bureau.
If the Trump administration can effectively implement the rule, beneficiaries become poor financial patients, regardless of better price competition, while the health experts are healthy.
“There is great public support for this initiative,” said Bai.
Some of that support comes from an impossible source: the Rapper Fat Joe.
Bronx hip-hop artist an ambassador for nonprofit Power of patientsa group of adbokasya pushing for health care. Through PSAs, public public installations and in-person events, the organization since 2021 pushes for additional price transparency.
Fat Joe said he was involved after the issue of the issue and how lack of transparency was the financial damage to the people around him. He appeared to commercialspoke at Capitol Hill and suggested Social Media Regarding the need for the price of transparency from the start of the organization.
“People are tired of these prices” always encouraging, said Fat Joe, adding that if people go to hospitals for a service, which is more roulette. ”
Melissa deitrich, a 49-year-old single woman from Ostia, Indiana, believed that he would benefit from a much more transparency price. Deitrich, who was involved in the power of the patients, said he overcharged his provider for more than a thousand dollars and now drives the most honor at the prices ahead.
“Peace is good in mind,” he said. “Complete price transparency is the only way patients can count on their health care system.”
‘Not ready for the main time’
Some public health experts, however, hesitated to take care of the potential change to bring to the new order. Hospital groups of 2020 opposed changes unsuccessfully challenged The previous Trump administration in court, arguing that the requirements weakened their negotiations with the advocates and violating their first amendment rights.
Denise Anthony, a Professor of Health and Policy Professor at the University of Michigan, said that because of the complex nature of health care, he is not sure this order has a lot of effect.
“There is evidence that even if price price data is available to patients, they will not use them to move to different Hospital / Provider,” Anthony said in an email. “There are all kinds of reasons people go to the same hospital despite the low prices elsewhere – doctor, history, order, etc.
Companies are like hike health, a platform that uses artificial intelligence to compare health care costs, how effective it is.
The CEO of the Company and Founder, Ahmed Mariush, saw Trump’s Executive Order, but believed that the command was not far away. While price data is the flooding of the market, he says, some health providers “fall across the transparency – if the printing of duplicates or misleading key data or making information difficult to access.”
Anderson, at Johns Hopkins, believed that the impetus behind the order is positive, but he is not sure wherever it is close to something real.
“It’s precious,” Anderson said. “Not ready for the main time – and I don’t know how to be ready for the main time.”
