The following op-ed was originally published on April 7, 2026 by The Dallas Morning News.
There’s a good chance that when you think about health care, price transparency isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. If you’re like most Texans, you pay your insurance and copay, and the insurance company pays the rest. What else do you need to know?
Plenty.
Price transparency affects everything from the cost of health insurance coming out of your paycheck to the economic health of your community and your state. A new federal law shows why that matters — and what state leaders can do to protect Texans and the Texas economy.
That transparency is worth a lot: more than $2 billion, according to Mark Miller, executive vice president of health care at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic organization.
“This bipartisan billing transparency legislation requires hospitals to disclose where care is provided – whether within a hospital or at an offsite outpatient clinic – rather than obscuring the site of care to receive higher hospital prices for the same services,” Miller explained. “This will help protect patients from unjust facility fees, lower costs for individuals and businesses, and save taxpayers more than $2.2 billion.”
While only applicable to Medicare billing, the new federal law echoes a state-level reform that Texas leaders tried to pass during last year’s Texas legislative session. Texas Rep. James Frank, R-Wichita Falls, and former state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, filed matching legislation that would have required health care providers to show, on all bills or invoices, the specific facility where services were delivered. More importantly, the legislation would have prohibited charging facility fees for telehealth – which, of course, doesn’t require patients to go to a facility – or preventive care.
The Texas legislation also would have established important requirements around national provider identifiers, or NPIs. These vital transparency tools show where services are actually delivered to patients. The legislation would have required providers to obtain NPIs for each location where they operate and to use those NPIs to indicate on bills where services were provided.
As with the federal law, the bills sought to ensure that Texans only pay for the actual services they receive, where they receive them.
Unfortunately, neither bill was passed by the state legislature. With the federal law’s passage, Texas lawmakers should revisit this legislation next year. Knowing where health care was provided matters, but the state also must be able to use that transparency to prevent improper billing.