Senator Marshall: Patients Deserve Upfront Healthcare Prices

Senator Marshall Asks for Unanimous Consent for his Bill to Lower Healthcare Costs Washington – On Wednesday, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. (R-Kansas), delivered remarks on the Senate floor asking for unanimous consent for his Patients Deserve Price Tags Act in an attempt to advance the bipartisan legislation and bring greater transparency to health care prices. Despite the objection, Senator Marshall remains committed to building bipartisan support for the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act and ensuring patients have access to clear, upfront prices for their care – helping lower health care costs for American families and, ultimately, drive down inflation. Click HERE or on the image above for Senator Marshall’s full remarks Senator Marshall’s remarks as delivered: “Mr. President, thanks for letting us come to the floor, and I do appreciate my colleague, Senator Bill Cassidy, being here with me today as well. Could you imagine? You’re in the market. You need a new car. You need a new truck, and you really need it badly. You don’t have a way to get to and from work, so you get online, and you look at the different models out there and are expected to make a purchase without knowing what the cost of that truck or that car was. Well, that’s the way healthcare is right now. We expect consumers to have all the healthcare delivered, and then months later, they get a bill for it. We think that patients deserve price tags, just like consumers do in every other form of business. You think about the challenges of America today. Certainly, the cost of living is up front, and it is personal. And one of the big drivers of that cost is healthcare, health insurance. We’ve seen it go from 13% to 18% of GDP. We’ve seen the cost of healthcare for a family go from maybe $500 a month a decade or two ago to now, it’s probably over $2,000 a month. So certainly, the cost of healthcare in so many ways is driving inflation, and this matters. It matters to the patients. It matters to the employers that are paying for the health insurance or a big portion of it. It matters to the federal government. If you’re trying to balance the budget, if we could get the cost of healthcare under control, that would help us get towards a balanced budget. I mean, my goodness, so it’s a $7 trillion budget. Maybe two sevenths of our federal budget is on healthcare. So, if there were more price tags, it would help bring the cost of healthcare down. Actually, about $1,000 a month. If patients had price tags that could bring down the cost of healthcare by $1,000 a month. Our bill, as you may know, came out of committee 22 to one. Good bipartisan support. Our bill has real teeth to it as well. Our belief is just like in all forms of business, transparency helps consumers, and that’s what we’re asking here. We’re not asking anything different than any other business. We want total transparency so patients can look at the different prices a healthcare provider would have to give their cost up front- not an estimate, a real, a real price up front as well. And again, I just can’t emphasize enough that this is bipartisan. It’s ready to move, and this is so important to the American consumer. I’ll stop there, Mr. President, and I’ll yield to my colleague from Louisiana.” ### Contact: Payton Fuller