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The prices that employers and insurers in central Texas pay for an ordinary in-hospital birth can range from $2,308 to $20,384, depending on what the payers have negotiated, according to Texas 2036.
Texas 2036, a nonprofit group that provides data and planning support services for Texas policymakers, is posting that kind of cost data to get Texas employers and hospitals interested in the idea of hospitals providing pricing data in a standardized, machine-readable format, to make pricing patterns easier for employers and other payers to analyze.
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The group recently published a large batch of the data on an interactive dashboard on its website.
Related: Hospital price transparency: Is it pushing prices down?
Texas lawmakers adopted state-level hospital pricing transparency requirements in 2021.
Compliance increased to 81% in August, from 31% in April 2022, but 7% of hospitals still aren't sending in any data, and many of the hospitals that are complying are using homegrown formats, according to Texas 2036.
"What's evident from our review of the currently available hospital pricing data in Texas is that there is no standard way that hospitals report this information," the group says. "A clear data standard could help encourage and improve reporting and provide researchers with cleaner data for analysis."
The group is proposing a standard spreadsheet that would include columns for information such as the hospital system name, the facility name, the gross price for a service, the cash discounted price and the minimum payer-negotiated price.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
