The Biden administration has proposed sharply higher penalties for larger hospitals that don’t make their prices public, The Wall Street Journal reported. The proposal would also clamp down on the use of special coding embedded in hospital webpages that prevents Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other search engines from displaying price pages in search results. The <em>Wall Street Journal</em> reported in March that hundreds of hospitals had embedded code in their disclosure webpages that kept them from being indexed by the search engines. Under the proposal, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency responsible for enforcing rules requiring hospitals publish their prices, is seeking to raise penalties as high as $2 million a year for large hospitals that fail to make prices public. Large hospitals are those with more than 30 beds. The proposed penalty is a sharp increase from the $109,500 maximum a year per hospital under existing rules. For hospitals with 30 or fewer beds, penalties remain the same.
