Few hospitals have complied with law requiring them to post prices online; is your closest hospital one of them?

Starting Jan. 1, 2021, a new law required U.S. hospitals to post on their websites the prices for services negotiated with insurers, as well as the discounts offered to patients who pay with cash, in an easily readable format. It's meant to lower medical costs and empower Americans to shop around for services, but over a year and a half later, few hospitals have complied. Is your nearest hospital one of them?

As of this month, only 319 of the 2,000 hospitals reviewed had complied with the law, according to a new report from nonprofit PatientRightsAdvocate.org. And though 793 of the hospitals reviewed had posted negotiated prices on their websites, 407 of them weren't compliant because most of their pricing data was missing or incomplete.

A recent ad from a patient-advocacy nonprofit claims that the government isn't enforcing the new law. But that's not true: "Turns out there is some enforcement, although the process is more complicated and slower-moving than some observers would like," Julie Appleby reports for Kaiser Health News and PolitiFact. Regulators hadn't fined any hospitals when the ad began running in mid-April, but in early June the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services fined the owner of two Atlanta-area hospitals about $1.1 million.

"As of late July, the agency had sent 368 warning notices to hospitals and issued 188 corrective action plan requests to hospitals that had previously received warning notices but had not yet corrected deficiencies," Appleby reports. "But enforcement is neither a quick nor an easy proposition. Each step in the process gives both sides time to work out the details."

Representatives from CMS and the American Hospital Association told Appleby compliance is taking longer because regulators and hospitals both face a learning curve in implementing the new law. However, the slow pace "means hospitals feel little pressure to comply despite fines that could reach $5,500 a day, patient advocates say," Ken Alltucker reports for USA Today.

In the meantime, CMS enforcement is driven mostly by complaints filed on its hospital price transparency website, Alltucker reports, with priority given to the most flagrant violators of the law.