The College of American Pathologists (CAP) expressed opposition to the Promoting Access to Treatments and Increasing Extremely Needed Transparency, or PATIENT Act (H.R. 3561), to institute site-neutral Medicare payment cuts to hospital outpatient departments and modify hospital price transparency requirements.
Section 105 of the legislation incorporates the provisions of H.R. 3248, the Diagnostic Lab Testing Transparency Act. This section requires diagnostic labs to exercise price transparency for clinical diagnostic laboratory tests. Specifically, they would need to make publicly available the discounted cash price, the deidentified minimum rate, and the deidentified maximum rate for clinical diagnostic laboratory tests offered by the lab that are included on the list of shoppable services specified by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The bill was ordered reported by the House Energy & Commerce Committee on May 24 in a roll call vote of 49-0 and will now advance to the House floor for debate and vote by the full chamber.
The CAP, along with other organizations, including the American Hospital Association, opposes such “burdensome measures [that] will negatively affect hospital-based practices and patient access to services,” the CAP writes in a June 6 advocacy update. The CAP also wrote that the utility of price transparency efforts has been questioned in the past, as patients are unable to shop for services like diagnostic tests. Additionally, these price transparency requirements would impose undue burdens on providers.
Sources:
https://www.cap.org/advocacy/latest-news-and-practice-data/june-6-2023#story4
