A Pennsylvania lawmaker has introduced a bill that would require hospitals to fully disclose their outpatient facility fees, which are charged for services performed in physicians' offices and other non-hospital settings.
Hospitals bill facility fees when patients receive treatment at physician practices and outpatient clinics that the hospital owns or leases. The facility fees often help offset the costs of less profitable, but necessary, services such as trauma care and emergency department services.
The bill, backed by Rep. Dan Frankel (D), would also require medical practices with more than one location to disclose to patients who are receiving care in an outpatient facility that they could receive the same care, without the extra facility fee charge, somewhere else.
"We simply can't expect patients to be savvy healthcare consumers without giving them the tools to make smart healthcare decisions," Rep. Frankel said in a release. "If our new healthcare reality is that patients need to be watching their medical bills, then we should at least tell them what their medical bills are going to be — and if hundreds of dollars in charges can be avoided by visiting the same doctor in a different office, patients deserve to know it."
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