BREAKING NEWS – Washington, D.C. – The Trump administration plans to require that hospitals post their standard charges online and update the information, with the intent that price transparency will allow consumers to shop around. “Knowing the charges is irrelevant for most people. And the people for whom it’s relevant have no negotiating power anyway,” because they’re not in charge of what treatments they get, said Gerard Anderson, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Hospital Finance and Management. For health reasons, the American Hospital Association emphatically stated that they do not want patients to see a cost breakdown, alleging that “if they found out during their hospital stay they were paying approximately $5 per sheet from a box of Kleenex, that might induce full cardiac arrest.”
