SOURCE: THE SANDERS INSTITUTE / MAY 1, 2026
My belief that health care is a right, not a privilege, goes back to college. As a student at Wesleyan University, I met Mark Masselli and helped him found a community health center that became Community Health Center, Inc., one of the country’s leading federally qualified health centers. CHC Inc. was founded on a conviction that has never left me: no one should be denied care because of what they earn, where they live, or what they can afford to pay.
That conviction guided me as governor to expand health care to 500,000 Coloradans and continues to drive my work today in the Senate.
Approximately 100 million Americans carry medical debt. Health care costs have grown two to three times faster than wages this century. Families making difficult choices between care and rent are not victims of bad luck. They’re victims of a system deliberately designed to obscure what care actually costs, hide what corporations and shareholders profit, and prevent patients from ever knowing what hit them until the bill arrives weeks later.
This is not dysfunction, but a strategy to juice profits with the costs falling hardest on working people.
That is why we introduced the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act. This bill attacks that cynical strategy at its source. It requires radical price transparency throughout the health care system. Not vague estimates, but actual prices that are published and accessible. It forces the middlemen who have grown rich in the shadows – the pharmacy benefit managers, the third-party administrators, the intermediaries engaged in spread pricing and overbilling – to disclose how much they take and forces them to explain why. It gives employer and union health plans the claims data they have long been denied so they can identify the cost drivers inflating premiums and design coverage for workers that is lower cost and better value.
It requires that every patient receive an itemized bill and an Explanation of Benefits after care. Up to 80 percent of medical bills contain errors, and patients are the ones left in the lurch without the information to fix the mistakes.
We introduced an earlier version of this legislation, the Health Care PRICE Transparency Act 2.0, together with Senator Bernie Sanders in 2024. Senator Sanders and I share a foundational belief: the corporations and intermediaries profiting from a deliberately opaque system are a central cause of health care unaffordability in America, and they must be held accountable.
You can’t fix what you can’t see. But transparency is not a substitute for systemic reform. It’s a precondition for it.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that recent bipartisan reforms requiring transparency from pharmacy benefit managers alone will save around $2 billion. This bill extends those same requirements across health care intermediaries for medical claims. The savings it generates belong to workers and families, not to the industry that has been quietly extracting them for decades.
Health care in America today functions as a system of managed ignorance. Patients can’t compare prices. Workers can’t audit what their premiums pay for. Employers can’t see the markups buried in their own plans. Every layer of opacity is a business model for someone profiting at a patient’s expense.
Ending that managed ignorance is not the only thing we owe working families. But it is a necessary step toward a system in the wealthiest country in the world that takes seriously the promise that health care is a right, not a privilege
It’s the same thing we believed when we founded that Community Health Center in Middletown, CT. Genuine access requires more than a door. It requires a system honest enough to let people walk through it. That work is not finished.
Article link: https://sandersinstitute.org/hidden-prices-broken-promises-why-health-care-transparency-is-a-matter-of-justice
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