Any Floridian who has suffered on the rack of annual, painful increases in his or her health insurance premiums or been bludgeoned by a huge bill for a medical procedure doesn’t need to be told that health-care costs are excessive.
So Gov. Rick Scott’s proposal last week to discourage hospitals from what he called “price gouging” is worth a good look from legislators.
Scott would require hospitals to post on an easily accessible part of their websites the prices they charge — and average payments they collect — for their services and products. The governor would also force more hospitals to release tax filings that include how much their executives are paid and how much they spend on lobbying.
While federal regulators require hospitals to disclose information on prices, it isn’t always easily accessible to the public. And the Catalyst for Payment Reform, a national group whose members include major corporations and state employee benefit providers, gave Florida an “F” for state laws on price transparency for hospitals. In fact, the group gave the same failing grade to 45 states.
Said Scott, “The high cost of health care continues to hurt some of our most vulnerable families in Florida, and the best way to guard against unfairly high hospital costs being passed on to patients is to require hospitals to be fully transparent with their own costs and patient charges.” And since most hospitals in the state receive funding from taxpayers, he added, they have a responsibility to disclose the details of their spending.
Of course, the governor’s motives are suspect. His proposal looks like the latest salvo in a public relations war he launched against hospitals earlier this year after they pressed for state lawmakers to pass a bipartisan Senate plan to accept billions of federal dollars to expand health care coverage to low-income Floridians, and offset reductions in other funding from Washington, D.C. Scott and House leaders were dead set against the plan, and eventually killed it.
If Scott were truly concerned about “some of our most vulnerable families in Florida,” why wouldn’t he embrace the Senate plan to provide them health insurance, especially after the state’s economists said Florida’s share of the cost would be covered by the additional tax revenue it would generate?
Instead, while the plan was still alive, Scott hastily put together a panel — the Commission on Healthcare and Hospital Funding — to put a spotlight on “record profits” at hospitals. Yet only one of his nine appointees to the panel had experience in health care. The panel continues to meet twice a month, but its lack of expertise undercuts its credibility. Scott didn’t even wait on the panel to make its legislative recommendations before unveiling his own proposals.
And there’s a special irony to Scott leading a battle against excessive profits and pay at hospitals, considering he accumulated a nine-figure fortune as the CEO of a private hospital chain before he became a politician.
All that said, the governor’s goal of greater transparency on hospital prices deserves support.
