Local hospitals included in Trump Administrations price transparency warning

DELMARVA – The Associated Press reports that the Trump Administration has warned over 500 hospitals nationwide that they are allegedly failing to provide transparent pricing information to the public, resulting in inflated healthcare costs.

Among those hospitals are several local institutions. According to the AP, Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, Bayhealth Hospital Kent Campus in Dover, and TidalHealth Nanticoke in Seaford are all included in the list of hospitals that received the warning from the administration.

Atlantic General Hospital recently joined the TidalHealth network as TidalHealth Atlantic. 

The Trump Administration argues that patients, employers, and insurers have been kept in the dark regarding the cost of several forms of treatments ahead of time, resulting in higher prices at the hospitals. The government is now warning those systems that failure to comply with transparent pricing standards could come with penalties as high as $2 million annually, according to the AP. 

A senior administration official tells the AP that Trump plans to tighten enforcement of the price transparency standards, and that more hospitals are expected to receive the letters to rectify a lack of pricing data. The federal requirements stem from a 2019 executive order from Trump and took effect this year.  

A full list of the hospitals that received the Trump Administration's warning to be more forthright with their pricing can be found here.

WBOC reached out to TidalHealth for comment on Wednesday and received the following statement:

“TidalHealth is committed to price transparency and to giving patients the information they need to make informed healthcare decisions. We recently received a notice from CMS identifying a technical encoding issue in the hospital address field of our machine-readable pricing file — our pricing data itself was publicly available throughout. We corrected the issue promptly and the updated file is now posted. We were also in communication with CMS to confirm our compliance. Providing clear, accessible pricing information to our patients and community remains a priority for TidalHealth.”