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We need your voice in the fight for transparency. In response to the Executive Order to Improve Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First, which the president signed in June, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a proposed rule and asked for public comment. It needs our support to become law.

Naturally, all those opposed to transparency are weighing in strongly against it, which is why we need you.

This is our moment. Please take two minutes to submit your comment to HHS about why you and your patients need to know the price of services before they're delivered, and how such transparency will help heal our health-care system.

Here are two links to make it easy for you: The first is for doctors and the second for patients and advocates. (Please share with your colleagues and patients.) Below that is AID's comment, which you are free to incorporate into your comment.

Doctor-focused page: https://actnow.io/1laoB0P

Please respond today. The comment period closes Sept. 27.

AID's Comment:
Real price transparency is the single, first, and most important step America can make toward bringing down health-care costs and creating a competitive marketplace. Thus, we at the Association of Independent Doctors, a national trade organization representing more than 1,000 members in over 40 states, support this proposed rule, specifically the requirement that all hospitals make their standard charges publicly available in an easy-to-access format. When consumers have access to real prices and, ultimately, also outcomes, and can shop for value the way they do in every other industry, they will have the power to choose their care based on real value - price and outcome.

Empowered with facts, consumers will move away from large health systems that layer in facility fees, and that consolidate by buying up doctors and other hospitals to gain market control and eliminate competition. Instead patients will move toward independent doctors, free-standing facilities and other affordable, high-value options. That's exactly the kind of market correction we need.

Once patients can choose to have a baby for $5,000 instead of $42,000, or an MRI for $350 instead of $3500, some players will lose money. Those are the ones working to derail, detract, dilute and otherwise undermine any hope of achieving true transparency.

Anyone still unconvinced of the positive power of this ruling needs only to look at who's against it: those who benefit from keeping prices in the dark. Bring on the sunshine.

Marni Jameson Carey
Executive Director, Association of Independent Doctors