Statements For The Record
Families USA submitted this statement for the record in advance of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)’s September 21 mark-up of S. 2840, the Bipartisan Primary Care and Health Workforce Act. S.2840 makes significant investments in America’s primary health care system and advances key policies to begin reining in the harmful pricing practices and anti-competitive behaviors of large hospital corporations. One crucial way the HELP Committee can build on the goals of this legislation to address provider consolidation and encourage competition in the health care system is by including provisions to strengthen price transparency. Read more...
Consumers First Joint Statement For The Record For Senate Finance Committee Hearing On Consolidation (6/7/23)
Consumers First submitted the attached joint statement for the record for the Senate Finance Committee hearing on “Consolidation and Corporate Ownership in Health Care: Trends and Impacts on Access, Quality, and Costs” on June 8. The statement urges the committee to consider the root drivers of the health affordability crisis and to advance well-vetted, bipartisan, and commonsense proposals including efforts to expand site neutral payments. Read more...
Consumers First submitted the attached joint statement for the record for today’s House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee hearing on “Lowering Unaffordable Costs: Legislative Solutions to Increase Transparency and Competition in Health Care,” which encourages the committee to consider and advance well-vetted, bipartisan, and commonsense proposals including efforts to codify and strengthen price transparency rules and expand site neutral payments. Read more...
Consumers First submitted the attached joint statement for the record to the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee ahead of their March 28th hearing on “Lowering Unaffordable Costs: Examining Transparency and Competition in Health Care,” which urges the committee to consider well-vetted, bipartisan, and commonsense legislation that would remedy some of the most obvious health system failings, and to take on rising health industry consolidation among hospitals, insurers, and other health care organizations that enables anticompetitive behaviors, prevents healthy competition in markets and results in monopolies that have the ability to set outrageous and unjustifiable prices. Read more...
Consumers First Commends Congress for Including Critical Provision from the Lower Health Care Cost Act in the COVID-19 Relief Package (12/21/20)
Consumers First, the alliance that brings together the diverse interests representing families and children, working people, employers, and primary care, applauds Congress for including Sections 301 of the Lower Health Care Costs Act (S.1895, as passed on a bipartisan basis by the HELP Committee in 2019) in the legislative package that will extend COVID-19 relief and end surprise medical bills. Consumers First has been working with Congress to enact this provision into law since 2019. Read more...
Consumers First, the alliance that brings together the diverse interests representing families and children, working people, employers, and primary care, urges Congress to include Sections 301 and 302 of the Lower Health Care Costs Act (S.1895, as passed on a bipartisan basis by the HELP Committee in 2019) in the legislative package that will extend COVID-19 relief and end surprise medical bills. Read more...
Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in American Hospital Association et al v. Alex M. Azar that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services can legally mandate site–neutral payments to off-campus hospital facilities. Consumers First strongly supports this decision. Read more...