And while CMS can fine hospitals up to $2 million, a recent semiannual report by the nonprofit Patient Rights Advocate showed that the agency is not strongly enforcing the rule, according to The Hill. Ho and her colleagues also say that CMS has no formal mechanism to audit or penalize providers with erroneous or misleading price information.

Cram says simply training billing office staff in the use of a health system's own price transparency website would go a long way in eliminating these web and phone discrepancies. He adds that CMS has broad authority to enforce the rule and that Congress and the Executive branch of government can exert influence as well. "We can and should demand better."


Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the University of Toronto also contributed to the study.

The findings were published in Journal of the American Medical Association: Internal Medicine.

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