A recent survey found that only 9% of adults are aware that hospitals are now required to post their prices for services online. As of January 1, 2021, hospitals must list the prices of common health services on their website, under the hospital price transparency rule finalized by the Trump administration.

The Kaiser Family Foundation Tracking Poll found that the vast majority of American adults do not know that this requirement exists that would allow them to shop for better prices for medical services. According to Fierce Healthcare, 69% said they are not sure hospitals are supposed to disclose their prices for treatments and procedures and 22% erroneously said they aren’t required to do so.

The data was reported this week by Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, a collaboration between the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey revealed an extremely low awareness for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) price transparency ruling for hospitals that went into effect on the first day of this year.

The survey found the same lack of awareness across income levels, age groups and health status. However, only 4% of non-Hispanic Black American were cognizant of this ruling. What the survey also discovered is that people who did comparison shop for hospital prices were more likely to be between the ages of 18 and 39. Nearly 25% of this age group compared prices versus only 9% of those older than 65.

Respondents in families with incomes of $40,000 or more were also more likely to seek prices than those with incomes under that threshold. The Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker analysis found that many hospitals are not complying with the one or more requirements of the CMS’ mandate, and this has prompted the agency to send out warnings to noncompliant hospitals in April.

The American Hospital Association tried to block the ruling last December, saying “that the disclosure of privately negotiated rates does nothing to help patients understand what they will actually pay for treatment and will create widespread confusion for them,” according to an AHA attorney, Melinda Hatton.

A JAMA Internal Medicine study published in June found that 83 out of 100 hospitals randomly sampled in March did not comply with at least one of the major requirements for the CMS ruling. More recently, this dropped slightly to 75 out of 100 high-revenue hospitals surveyed across the country, said a recent news report.

One of the compliant hospitals contacted by Newsmax, Boca Raton Regional Hospital, a member of Baptist Health South Florida, features an online pricing tool as well as a phone number and email information so that insured patients can calculate their estimated prices for treatments and service.

The authors of the Peterson-KFF Health System tracker said that while “price transparency may help some patients seek lower-priced care for non-emergency treatment and incur fewer costs, the available pricing information has to be accessible and useful for that to happen, and patients would first need to be aware that they can find the price of care online.”

“With only one in ten adults aware of the federal requirement for hospitals to publicly post prices for services, the potential for price transparency efforts to reduce costs remains a question.”