New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and 32BJ President Manny Pastreich appeared jointly in a new video highlighting the Healthcare Accountability Report, recently published by the NYC Office of Healthcare Accountability. The report found that pricing, not how much care consumers use, remains the primary cause of rising healthcare costs, and it uncovered extreme price variation across city hospitals.
Key findings show a C-section can cost anywhere from $7,000 to $64,000 depending on the hospital, while an emergency room visit can range from $210 to $6,000. Nearly 70% of the City health plans' 2025 hospital benefit spending, about $3 billion, was concentrated in the five largest NYC academic medical centers. The average marketplace premium reached $909 per month in 2025, up 20% over two years, and the City's total spend on employee and retiree premiums reached $10.03 billion in Fiscal Year 2025, up 15% over two years.
The report also found that the commercial insurance claim denial rate in 2024 was around 25%, yet fewer than 3% of denials were appealed internally, even though appeals win up to a third of the time. Pastreich said the report "helps put the power back into people's hands by exposing the outrageous prices and growing hospital consolidations that drive up healthcare costs," and he supports implementing the stakeholder convening provisions of Local Law 78 and the Fair Pricing Act in Albany.
What remains unknown from the available source is how hospital systems will respond to the report's findings or whether the proposed accountability measures will be enacted. The source does not provide data on how price variation affects patient outcomes or whether increased transparency alone would reduce costs without additional regulatory action.