; findings (a) Short title This Act may be cited as the Transparency and Accountability in Health Care Costs and Prices Act of 2020 . (b) Findings Congress finds the following: (1) According to official estimates published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Americans spent a total of $3.6 trillion on health care in 2018, or $11,172 per person. (2) Spending on hospital care services reached $1.2 trillion in 2018 and rose by 4.5 percent from the previous year. This growth occurred even as Americans made fewer hospital visits because of growth in hospital prices. (3) Spending on physician visits and clinical services reached $725.6 billion in 2018 and rose by 4.1 percent from the previous year. (4) Spending on prescription drugs reached $335 billion in 2018 and rose by 2.5 percent from the previous year. (5) According to a 2019 analysis of a subset of commercial insurance claims by the independent, non-partisan Health Care Cost Institute, prices for common medical services could vary up to 25 times between different metro areas and up to 39 times for the same service within the same metro area. (6) A 2015 analysis of a subset of commercial insurance claims by Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT researchers found that even within one hospital, prices for certain common services like lower limb MRIs, knee replacements, and colonoscopies could vary by 23.5 percent on average depending on which insurer covered the patient. (7) Information about contracts between providers and insurers available to researchers, policymakers, and the public is limited or incomplete because these contracts frequently prohibit disclosure of information about how providers are paid. (8) All-payer claims databases (APCDs) are large-scale databases increasingly adopted by States to collect health care claims data across different payers such as private insurers, government employee health plans, Medicare, and Medicaid. (9) APCD data can be shared with vetted and authorized users to make it easier to track