When Congress passed and President Trump signed the bipartisan Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations bill earlier this month, they teed up a huge opportunity for Texas lawmakers to lower health care prices and save taxpayers billions of dollars.
The law requires health care providers, before invoicing Medicare for their services, to acquire site-specific national provider identifiers (NPIs). These indicators are important transparency tools, showing where services are actually delivered to patients. It helps ensure that patients, insurance companies, and employers who provide health coverage are not paying for more than the health care they bought.
The new law echoes legislation filed during last year’s Texas Legislative Session by Rep. James Frank and Sen. Kelly Hancock. These matching bills would have required health care bills to show the specific facility where services were delivered; they also would have prohibited facility fees for telehealth or preventative care – which, of course, don’t require patients to go to a facility.
The Texas legislation also would have required health care providers to obtain NPIs for each location 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.
The state and federal efforts demonstrate the vital role of transparency in health care. Texas lawmakers can supercharge these efforts during next year’s legislative session by requiring the use of NPIs in all health care billing.
“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,” explains Mark Miller, executive vice president of Health Care at Arnold Ventures. “This will help protect patients from unjust facility fees, lower costs for individuals and businesses, and save taxpayers more than $2.2 billion.”
While the bills introduced by Rep. Frank and Sen. Hancock passed out of their respective committees during last year’s legislative session, neither advanced to a full vote by both the Texas House and Senate. Next year, lawmakers will have another opportunity to take up this vital issue of health care pricing transparency – and to save money for Texas families, employers, and taxpayers.