Q: How are you working to lower health care costs?
A: In addition to my efforts to lower prescription drug costs, I’m also working to help reduce sticker shock for patients when they open medical bills from the hospital. Patients should be able to compare prices and shop around for health care services. More often than not, pricing information isn’t easily available. The U.S. health care sector would benefit from a strong dose of sunshine to help drive costs down. Transparency brings accountability. For example, I’m working with Sen. Dick Durbin to require pharmaceutical companies to include drug prices in their television advertising. The same thinking prompted my work to make hospital costs public. Price transparency would allow consumers to benefit from market competition and get the best value for their money. Patients ought to know how much their hospital stay and medical services would cost before they receive care. My bipartisan legislation with Sen. Mike Braun would enact into federal law rules directing hospitals and insurers to publish cash prices and negotiated rates so patients know before they go. In our consumer-driven economy, the marketplace fosters competition and innovation, leading to better services and better value for Americans. My Health Care PRICE Transparency Act 2.0 would unleash those market forces and strengthen accountability requirements. It’s time to pull back the curtain on murky pricing arrangements between insurers and providers that foster bloat, waste and wide price disparities for medical services and procedures from one hospital and patient to the next. Our bill will put existing sunshine regulations into statute and beef up accountability. Among other provisions, our bill would require machine-readable files of all negotiated rates and cash prices, not estimates, to make published costs user-friendly for consumers; require publication for 300 services for which patients can comparison-shop by 2025; and, expand price transparency requirements beyond hospital services to clinical diagnostic labs, imaging centers and ambulatory surgical centers. As work gets underway in this second session of the 118th Congress, I’ll continue to push my bipartisan efforts to lower prescription drug prices and reduce sticker shock for medical care to help families already struggling to afford rising costs for groceries, energy and housing.
Q: What reforms are you pushing to improve patient safety?
A: For the past decade, I’ve teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren to improve patient safety and accountability with medical device products. Similar to our efforts to allow hearing aids to be sold over-the-counter, we’re fighting bureaucratic inertia to get off the stick and implement rules that would include medical device identifier (DI) information on federal forms for Medicare claims. The bureaucratic quagmire is unacceptable. Our efforts would help save lives and lower health care costs. According to recommendations made by the American National Standards Institute’s accreditation standards committee, X12, including this information on claims transactions would help reduce patient health risks, improve tracking and reporting protocols and save taxpayer dollars. Quite simply, getting this rule implemented without further delay is a matter of life and death. There’s no excuse for dilly dallying on recommendations that would more effectively track device failures. In 2017, a federal watchdog found that recalls or premature failures of just seven faulty cardiac devices resulted in an estimated $1.5 billion in Medicare payments and $140 million in out-of-pocket costs to beneficiaries. This effort remains one of the top unimplemented recommendations by the Inspector General to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in health care programs. Strengthening the reporting and tracking system to detect faulty or recalled medical devices will help save lives and give families peace of mind for loved ones who have metal hip replacements or rely on insulin pumps or heart devices to improve their quality of life. Without a doubt, innovative medical devices and technologies in modern medicine have enhanced the quality of life, improved screening and treatments and saved lives for patients with heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other chronic conditions. Strengthening accountability and data collection will help make these life-saving devices even better for patients and providers.