Congress mandates healthcare price disclosure—but will patients actually use it?
S. 2355 — Patients Deserve Price Tags Act · Filed by Roger Marshall (R-KS) · 24 cosponsors · Introduced Jul 17, 2025 · Reported out
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill requires hospitals, insurers, clinical laboratories, imaging centers, and ambulatory surgical centers to publicly disclose their standard prices for medical services in machine-readable and consumer-friendly formats, updated quarterly. It mandates disclosure of gross charges, discounted cash prices, payer-specific negotiated rates, and ownership information, with civil penalties up to $35 per bed per day for non-compliance and restrictions on debt collection during non-compliance periods.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core mechanism is a regulatory requirement forcing disclosure of pricing data across multiple healthcare sectors. It is fundamentally a transparency and accountability measure, not a subsidy, carve-out, or deregulation.
What the text implies
- Disclosure of payer-specific negotiated rates may reveal competitive pricing strategies and enable reverse-engineering of negotiation leverage, potentially affecting future contract negotiations between insurers and providers.
- The bill requires disclosure of ownership and management relationships but defers to HHS rulemaking to define scope; vague ownership thresholds could create compliance uncertainty and selective disclosure.
The full analysis lists 5 implications of this text.
Who stands to gain
health information technology vendors (price transparency software/platforms); patient advocacy organizations (data access for comparative analysis); price comparison and healthcare shopping platforms