Many Americans have no way of knowing how much a hospital will charge them for a routine procedure until weeks later when the bill arrives in the mail.

I t can be scary to go to the hospital when you are sick or injured, but it can be even more terrifying to get the bill.

Many Americans have no way of knowing how much a hospital will charge them for a routine medical procedure until weeks later when the bill arrives in the mail. This doesn’t happen anywhere else. If I wanted to know the exact price of every mayonnaise at the grocery store, I could pull up the website and tell you in two minutes.

This lack of transparency not only allows hospitals to charge breathtakingly high prices without fear of competition from other facilities, but it also allows them to charge different patients different rates for the same procedure.

One study in Atlanta, for example, found that hospitals charged patients anywhere from $435 to $7,000 for a colonoscopy — yet patients had no way of knowing which hospital would charge them 16 times more for the procedure. Today, the median hospital markup is five times the true cost of the service. The American people deserve better.

The Trump administration has been fighting to address hospital price transparency since the president’s first term in office. The president issued an executive order in 2019 directing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to develop a rule that required hospitals to provide transparent, easy-to-find pricing on their websites. CMS finalized its rule in January 2021, yet a recent study revealed that as few as 21 percent of American hospitals have fully complied.

How can that be? To start, the Biden administration largely refused to enforce President Trump’s original executive order on price transparency. President Biden’s CMS issued violations against just four hospitals during his first two years in office, according to one report. Enforcement didn’t ramp up until 2023, when a nonprofit sued the administration for more information about why so few hospitals had listed their prices.

Even when the Biden administration finally began to enforce the pricing rule, CMS gave hospitals an average of six months to develop a corrective action plan for publishing the prices after issuing an initial violation warning. CMS gave some hospitals more than a year to comply with the rule.

To be clear, all a hospital needs to do to comply with this rule is compile a spreadsheet of its prices in the format specified by CMS. This is not something that should be a six-month-long project for hospitals with billion-dollar budgets.

CMS granted these hospitals months and months to comply, yet many still refuse to follow the rule because the fines are not significant enough to make compliance worthwhile. For some hospitals, the fines for violating the rule were as low as $300 per day. That is pocket change for high-dollar institutions that do not want patients to know what their prices are.

Unfortunately for these hospitals, President Trump has had enough of the games. On February 25, he announced an executive order instructing his entire administration to crack down on hospitals and insurers who refuse to place clear, accessible prices online.

Congress can help the Trump administration hold these hospitals accountable by doubling the fines of those who refuse to comply. My Hospital Transparency Compliance Enforcement Act would increase penalties for noncompliance to as much as $11,000 per day for large hospitals.

American consumers, employers, and insurers could have saved an estimated $80 billion if President Trump’s original price transparency order had been enforced under President Biden. Families cannot afford for Congress to sit by while hospitals continue to ignore our rules to the detriment of patients.

If Louisianians can find the price of a side of mashed potatoes at any of the 600 Cracker Barrel locations around the country, they ought to be able to find the price of a blood test at the nearest hospital, too. Hospitals cannot keep denying patients the information they need to make the best decisions for their families.