The FTC Just Told Hospitals: Post Your Prices or See Us in Court
The Federal Trade Commission just threatened to take 24 of the largest hospital systems in America to court for hiding their prices.
On Monday, the FTC sent warning letters to 24 of "the nation's largest healthcare services" over how they handle price transparency. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson didn't soften it: "Healthcare providers must disclose their prices to consumers and must do so starting today. If they do not, then the FTC will take them to court."
He also said the FTC has already opened price transparency investigations into hospitals. These letters aren't the opening move. They're the last warning.
What the letters actually say
Hospitals have been required to post prices since 2021 under a rule written by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A lot of them have treated that rule as a box to check.
The FTC just closed that loophole. The letters call the CMS rules "a regulatory floor" and say plainly that "CMS rules do not provide a safe harbor from liability under the FTC Act."
In plain English: technically following the CMS rule doesn't protect you. If the price you post misleads patients about what they'll really pay, that can be an unfair or deceptive practice under federal law.
The letters spell out one example directly. A posted price that leaves out physician fees or facility fees can mislead patients about the full cost of their care. The FTC says hospitals need to provide "timely, accurate, and complete pricing," especially for non-emergency services scheduled in advance, and it told the 24 systems to review their practices and fix them quickly.
What a hidden price looks like
If you've ever gotten a hospital bill, you already know.
A woman recently posted a bill for an MRI that came to about $34,000. Around $32,000 of that was facility fees, charged because the imaging center she walked into was classified as a hospital outpatient department. Nothing on the sign out front said hospital. Nothing she was told before the scan said $32,000.
That's the pattern. The "price" you can find covers one piece of the care. Then the bills arrive from everyone else: the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the radiologist, the lab, and the building itself.
And when hospitals do post the numbers, they often bury them in enormous machine-readable files built for software, not people. Technically public. Practically useless to the patient trying to decide where to get a knee scan.
A price you can't see until the bill shows up was never a price.
Half of hospitals still aren't following the rules
Five years after the rule took effect, compliance is still a coin flip.
An August review of 2,000 hospitals by the advocacy group PatientRightsAdvocate.org found just 49.4% were complying with the federal price transparency rule. Between April and early June of this year, more than 500 hospitals received warning notices or corrective action requests from CMS for falling short.
The FTC letters landed the same day CMS finalized a new rule meant to make the price data that hospitals and insurers publish easier to find and use. The government is now pushing from two directions: CMS making the files usable, and the FTC saying a technically compliant file can still be deceptive.
Think about that for a second. Every gas station in America posts its price on a sign twenty feet tall. Hospitals needed a federal warning letter.
Why real prices change everything
The FTC's own letter makes the core point. When prices aren't fully disclosed in advance, patients can't compare providers, and that undermines competition.
And when people can compare, the results are eye-opening. A Johns Hopkins study published this year compared hospitals' posted cash prices with their insurer-negotiated prices for the 20 physician-administered drugs Medicare spends the most on. Depending on the drug, the cash price beat the typical negotiated rate at 29% to 50% of hospitals. For Keytruda, at one in five hospitals, cash beat every insurance contract they had.
The same drug at the same hospital had anywhere from 9 to 21 different negotiated prices depending on whose card you handed over.
That's what hidden prices protect. The markup.
What you can do before scheduled care
The FTC is focused on non-emergency care scheduled in advance, and that's exactly where you have leverage.
Ask for the total price in writing before you schedule. Include the facility fee, the doctor's fee, anesthesia, imaging and labs.
Ask for the cash price. Most providers have one, and they rarely volunteer it.
Ask whether the location bills as a hospital outpatient department. That label is often what triggers a facility fee.
Call more than one place. Independent imaging centers and surgery centers often charge a fraction of what hospital-owned locations charge for the same service.
If a provider won't give you a straight answer, that tells you something too.
How we do it at Forest Park Pharmacy
We didn't need a warning letter. Our prices have been posted since day one.
The cost of the drug plus a flat fee, right there on the website, before you pay a dime. No facility fee. No separate bill from somebody you never met. No negotiated rate that changes depending on whose card you hand over. Everybody pays the same price, and you see it first.
Head to forestparkpharmacy.com, check the price checker, and transfer today to save.
See ya.
