At the Sanders Institute, we've long understood that greedy corporations use opacity to preserve their power.
When health care corporations hide how much they charge, when intermediaries bury their markups in fine print, when patients receive bills they can't decipher, that’s their business model at work.
We’ve held sessions on health care price transparency at Sanders Institute Gatherings before with Cynthia Fisher from Patient Rights Advocate providing astonishing data. SEnator Sanders and our fellows have sponsored legislation and pitched ideas at our events and in the media. Now, Senator John Hickenlooper has picked up this baton and introduced the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act to attack this cynical strategy at its source and expose the shadow economy. Up to 80 percent of medical bills contain errors. Without transparency, patients are left in the lunch without the information to fix mistakes.
As Sen. Hickenlooper writes in a post on The Sanders Institute’s website today:
"Health care in America today functions as a system of managed ignorance. Patients can't compare prices. Workers can't audit what their premiums pay for. Employers can't see the markups buried in their own plans. Every layer of opacity is a business model for someone profiting at a patient's expense."
The Patients Deserve Price Tags Act attacks this cynical strategy at its source. It requires:
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Actual prices to be published and accessible—not vague estimates
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Middlemen to disclose how much they take and explain why
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Employer and union health plans to receive claims data they’ve long been denied
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Every patient to receive an itemized bill and Explanation of Benefits after care
Transparency is not a substitute for systemic reform. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that recent bipartisan reforms requiring transparency from pharmacy benefit managers alone will save around $2 billion. This bill extends those same requirements across health care intermediaries for medical claims. The savings belong to workers and families, not to the industry that has been quietly extracting them for decades.
This is what the Sanders Institute does. We bring bold ideas from the margins to the center of power through civil discourse - because we know that a vital democracy requires an informed electorate.
We’re working on our next convening now. From AI to climate to health care to peace, our Fellows are leading voices building the infrastructure that will build the future we deserve. We would greatly appreciate your support of The Sanders Institute!
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In solidarity,
The Sanders Institute
Read Sen. Hickenlooper's full piece on why health care transparency is a matter of justice here.
