It's unsurprising the nation's hospital lobby lost its latest legal challenge in the case to force hospitals to reveal the negotiated rates they reach with insurers for services provided to patients.
The three-judge panel was highly skeptical of the hospital lobby's claims when it heard oral arguments in October and pushed back in their line of questioning.
...The undoing of the case may have been when AHA's litigator told judges certain prices are "unknowable."
That only provoked more questions from primarily two of the three judges who seemed baffled by the assertion that prices were unknowable. Judges Merrick Garland and Tatel — both appointed by former President Bill Clinton — launched into a lively line of questioning about the cost of X-rays.
...The hospital lobby had argued that it's impossible to know the rates because in some instances a patient may require more care than was originally anticipated.
I've mused before about how Avik Roy has a tendency to write lengthy screeds which breathlessly report developments which seem, to him, to be shocking revelations which will no doubt blow the lid off of some sort of nefarious actions on the part of President Obama, the HHS Dept. or Democrats in general...but which, when looked at by a rational person, tend to be fairly innocuous developments which were either already known, patently obvious and/or pretty much non-events in the scheme of things.
For instance, check out this blockbuster from back in March, regarding the HHS Dept's contingency plan in the event that the Obama administration had lost the King v. Burwell case at the Supreme Court (spoiler: they ended up winning):
