Healthcare Matters

Airlines can no longer understate the cost of a plane ticket by leaving taxes and other government fees out of their advertised rates, under new rules that won U.S. court approval yesterday. In short, the U.S. Transportation Department has said that any ticket price shown in an advertisement must be “the entire price to be paid by the customer.” What a concept!

In fact, that’s not what the new rules accomplished. Consumer groups failed to get the Court’s support for forcing the airlines to disclose optional but common costs such as baggage fees and the new, incremental seat costs that have found their way into ticketing calculus. The new rules do go against the airlines’ desire to stop paying ticket cancellation refunds. The Court said that customers should still be able to cancel tickets without penalty within 24 hours of purchase. And the industry is now prohibited from raising costs like seat and baggage fees after a customer has purchased tickets.

Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote for the majority and ruled on evidence presented that “sufficiently supports the intuitive conclusion that customers are likely to be deceived by price quotes significantly lower than the actual cost of travel.” In a dissenting opinion, Judge Raymond Randolph said that the previous rules that effectively required airlines to bury tax information in the fine print were adequate. Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Misty Pinson said the airline industry is “already over-regulated and over-taxed” and that “Americans will pay more for air travel as a result of the Court’s decision.” Did she really say that?

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was meant to provide some level of protection to gay men and women serving in the military (under the Clinton Administration). It was not meant to describe how suppliers of expensive physician preference items should deal with their hospital-customers or how hospital AR departments should deal with patients. The Affordable Care Act’s conspicuous avoidance of healthcare’s long standing price transparency issue is a full-stop embarrassment. The politics here are shameful. The lobbyists who succeeded in keeping such a sweeping problem swept under the rug should be congratulated. They’ve been highly effective.

I just put my daughter on a plane this morning. She’s off to a lacrosse camp. Her baggage and seating fees (the non-premium coach seats were “sold out”) are well over half of the round trip fare. I’m just hoping she doesn’t get injured while she’s there. But if that happens and she needs medical care, at least I’ll have a general idea of how much it’s going to cost me to bring her home.

—Tom Finn