Your hospital bill just became public—but will prices actually drop?
H.R. 9645 — Health Care Price Certainty for All Americans Act · Filed by Jason Smith (R-MO) · Introduced Jul 13, 2026 · Reported out
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What it does
This bill requires hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, clinical diagnostic laboratories, and imaging providers that receive Medicare payments to publicly disclose their standard charges and negotiated prices for medical services, starting January 1, 2027 for hospitals and 2028 for other providers. Patients and the public gain access to price information through machine-readable formats and consumer-friendly tools, enabling price comparison before receiving care. The bill also requires health insurers to provide cost-sharing estimates to patients upon request by 2029.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core mechanism is a regulatory mandate requiring Medicare-participating providers to disclose pricing information to the public. It is fundamentally a transparency and consumer-protection measure, not a subsidy, carve-out, or deregulation.
What the text implies
- Price disclosure may reveal wide variation in negotiated rates across payers, potentially triggering political pressure for rate regulation or narrowing of negotiated discounts.
- Smaller hospitals and rural providers face compliance costs (attestation, tool maintenance, audits) that may be disproportionate to their size; the bill includes hardship waivers but caps their use.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
Healthcare price-comparison platforms and software vendors (compliance tools, data aggregation); Consulting firms specializing in healthcare compliance and pricing analytics; Potential indirect benefit to large insurers and employers with sophisticated data analytics capabil