Fat Joe is using his voice and influence to highlight the important issue of price transparency in healthcare, PEOPLE reports.
In a recent public service announcement by Power to the Patients, a non-profit, advocacy group for healthcare patients, the Bronx rapper is challenging politicians “to enforce healthcare price transparency nationwide” and to bring about systemic changes that patients need.
“To every elected official and politician in America… the people stand united, desperate for you to listen,” Fat Joe says in the PSA while surrounded by American workers, union members, and employers. “If you’re not advocating for prices and transparency in healthcare… you are compromising every single American across this country.”
“Because when we can’t see prices, hospitals, insurers, and their middlemen charge us whatever they want. Our very own healthcare system is robbing all of us. We just need the prices,” Fat Joe continued. “That’s how our economy works!
Before his now infamous exit from the White House in 2021, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order that required hospitals to make prices of health services available to the public.
In 2023, President Joe Biden demanded that the Department of Health and Human Services enforce the rule with his own executive order.
According to Patient Rights Advocate, only 34.5% of 2,000 hospitals have complied with being transparent about their cost of care for patients. Some hospitals reportedly “have missing or incomplete pricing, unusable files that are difficult or impossible to open to access pricing data, or posted multiple files instead of one as mandated by the federal government.”
Until the healthcare industry becomes more transparent, you expect the “Lean Back” to continue raising the issue that’s so important to millions of Americans.
“If you want to do right by workers, employers, and unions, then you’ve gotta to do right by the people they represent and the families who depend upon them,” Fat Joe said. “And we gotta hear it. Prices now! Power to the Patients.”
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