PlainBillCongress, translated.Legislation. Context. Public interest.Read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.
Congressional Research Service
Version 00 · Introduced in Senate · Feb 6, 2014
Consumer Learning through Electronically-Accessible and Reasonable Cost Information Act of 2013 [sic] or CLEAR Cost Information Act of 2013 [sic] - Amends title XVIII (Medicare) of the Social Security Act (SSA) to require service providers, in order to be qualified to participate and receive Medicare payments under any agreement filed with the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), to report to the Secretary payment data on "subsection (d) hospitals."
(Generally, a subsection (d) hospital is an acute care hospital, particularly one that receives payments under Medicare's inpatient prospective payment system when providing covered inpatient services to eligible beneficiaries.)
Requires a subsection (d) hospital to submit to the Secretary data on the actual amounts it has collected from uninsured and insured patients over the preceding two years for each of the 50 most common diagnosis-related groups and ambulatory payment classification groups for which payment is made in both the inpatient and outpatient settings.
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Requires each annual report submitted to Congress by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC) to contain information on the percentage that charity care makes up of the total care furnished by hospitals and critical access hospitals.
Amends the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to require the Secretary of the Treasury to post data on trends in the levels of charity care provided by certain hospitals on a publicly accessible and searchable website. Amends SSA title XVIII to require hospitals and critical access hospitals to include a link to such data on their home Internet websites.
People & committees
Sen. Coburn, Tom [R-OK] · R–OK
Legislative record
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Read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.
Introduced in Senate
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Source last updated: Aug 12, 2025. Consult Congress.gov for the current record.
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