Posts categorized as: Transparency

On November 20, 2024, the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms hosted a policy briefing to ...

Hospitals provide essential care, but their financial realities differ dramatically: some opera...

This brief explores policy opportunities such as price regulation, competition, transparency, and enforcement reforms to improve health care affordability.

Through a collection of fact-sheets on hospital payment streams, various designations, and key sources of information, this guide offers a starting point to understand the organizational and financial differences across hospitals in the United States. This document provides key questions to ask a hospital – about ownership, type of care, location, type of patients, teaching status, and alternative payment – the answers to which can help better understand the regulations under which a hospital operates, the funding streams it may have available, and other factors that influence its business practices and financial status. This document overviews key terms, concepts, and measures related to hospital revenue from three payment types: Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance. This series of fact sheets describe how a hospital’s organization form influences its business and financial operations, eligibility for federal programs, and level of government oversight and public reporting requirements. This series of fact sheets overviews subsection (d) hospitals (“general acute care hospitals”) and Medicare-recognized specialty hospitals, explains how these hospitals are treated under Medicare and 340B, and provides descriptive statistics for each hospital type. This series of fact sheets explain how a hospital’s location influences how and what it gets paid by Medicare, as well as explains how each type of rural hospital is treated under Medicare and 340B, and provides descriptive statistics for each rural hospital type. This series of fact sheets describe how “safety-net hospitals” – Medicare and Medicaid disproportionate share hospitals (DSH) and 340B hospitals – quality and are paid under their respective federal programs, and provides descriptive statistics for each program. This series of fact sheets define graduate medical education and describe U.S. teaching hospitals with key descriptive statistics on institutional characteristics. This series of fact sheets defines the goals of alternative payment models and describes the Medicare Shared Savings Program as well as a range of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center models. This document identifies key sources for understanding an individual hospital’s ownership, regulatory and payment classification, and its financial, operational, and quality performance beyond what is covered in the What to Ask (About) a Hospital guide.

As corporations and private equity increasingly take control of our health care systems and profits take precedence over care, patients are caught in the middle.

A guide for policymakers and state regulators to understand the extent of corporatization in your state and how your state regulates corporate practices in healthcare.

This cheat sheet outlines state-level policy options—such as site-neutral payment caps, facility fee billing prohibitions, billing and ownership transparency requirements, outpatient facility fee reporting requirements, coverage and cost-sharing protections, and consumer disclosures—to reform outpatient billing practices by protecting consumers, reducing health care costs, and increasing transparency.

This issue brief describes how states are regulating outpatient facility fee billing in the commercial market through policy reforms such as facility fee prohibitions, out-of-pocket cost protections, consumer disclosure requirements, hospital reporting requirements, and provider transparency requirements.

Hospital financial data are often fragmented across multiple sources and require specialized experti...

The Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in July 2025, strives to make heal...

Many of the regulatory and oversight activities influencing the American health care system occur at...

On October 29, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) hosted an event d...

The Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in July 2025, seeks to bring great...

As state policymakers grapple with rising commercial health care prices, they showed a growing inter...

In May, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury announced several acti...

While Indiana lawmakers have been working to reduce health care costs for commercial health insuranc...

As U.S. health care spending continues to spiral higher, states are using a variety of tools to push...

While the health plan price transparency data available under current guidance and enforcement have ...

In February, the Trump administration issued an executive order outlining steps for federal agencies...

Massachusetts recently enacted a law to increase transparency and oversight of private equity in hea...