If a hospital can hand a patient a bill three months later, they can hand the patient a price three minutes earlier.
What it does.
Doc introduced S. 2355, the Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, on July 17, 2025 as the lead sponsor. The bill puts the Trump administration's hospital and insurer price-transparency rules into statute and broadens them. Hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging centers, and clinical diagnostic labs would be required to publish real prices, not estimate ranges, for at least 300 shoppable services starting at enactment, with all priced services covered by 2026. Penalties for noncompliance start at $300 per day for the smallest facilities and scale up to a $10 million maximum for the largest hospitals.
Doc made the case for the bill in a Fox News op-ed on March 5, 2026: the Trump medical transparency initiative could save patients roughly $1 trillion over a decade by giving them the same information any other consumer has before they buy. Right now a Kansas family scheduling an MRI or a knee replacement cannot get a real price quote from the hospital, the surgery center, or the imaging clinic. The bill ends that. It requires posted prices in machine-readable files and in consumer-friendly formats so patients, employers, and the press can actually compare.
The legislation has drawn a bipartisan cosponsor coalition and endorsements from PatientRightsAdvocate.org, Consumer Watchdog, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Employers' Forum of Indiana. It is currently in the Senate HELP Committee. The House companion, H.R. 5582, runs the same playbook on the House side.
Medical debt remains a major driver of financial strain for Kansas families. Transparent pricing puts patients on a level playing field with hospitals before the bill arrives, not after. The Critical Access Hospitals that anchor rural Kansas already operate on thin margins; transparent pricing protects patients without adding overhead the hospitals cannot absorb. Posted prices also give Kansas employers, who pay the bulk of family premiums, a real shot at steering plan design toward the best-value providers in their region.