President Trump takes on surprise medical bills

President Trump and his health chief pledged last week to tackle the issue of surprise medical bills, raising the prospect of bipartisan action on a major health care problem.

"We are here today to discuss how the healthcare system too often harms people with unfair surprises... in a very negative sense, medical bills and the like," Trump said at a meeting at the White House with patients who had faced such circumstances. "The pricing is hurting patients and we have stopped a lot of it, and we are going to stop all of it, and it's very important to me."

Some have proposed requiring doctors to notify patients when they could rack up high medical bills or providing more information to patients so they can make informed choices about where to receive care.

People can receive an unexpected big bill if they are administered an expensive medication that their health insurance won't cover or if a doctor who assists in surgery at a hospital turns out to be outside of their network, an occurrence that can happen even when a patient is under anesthesia or in the emergency room for a traumatic injury.

"Patients should know... what's going on with the real prices of procedures, because they don't know," President Trump said at the White House meeting. "They go in, they have a procedure then all of a sudden they can't afford it. They had no idea it was so bad."

The White House said in a statement that the administration was "committed to delivering a healthcare system that takes care of the American people – not one that takes advantage of them."

The Trump administration said the roundtable mostly would focus on price transparency, or making sure that people understand what different costs are involved in their care. Alex Azar, Health and Human Services Secretary, said at the meeting that the way to bring down costs and improve quality was to "empower consumers and to employ market forces."