- Despite Being Shamed For Overcharging Patients, Hospitals Raised Their Prices, Again Washington Post by Lena H. Sun—A year ago, a study about U.S. hospitals marking up prices by 1,000 percent generated headlines and outrage around the country. Twenty of those priciest hospitals are in Florida, and researchers at the University of Miami wanted to find out whether the negative publicity put pressure on the community hospitals to lower their charges. Hospitals are allowed to change their prices at any time, but many are growing more sensitive about their reputations. What the researchers found, however, was that naming and shaming did not work. .. “We were thinking we would see a drop or lowering of some charges,” said Karoline Mortensen, one of the authors of the study published in the Journal of Health Care Finance earlier this year. “There’s nothing stopping them,” she said, referring to the hospitals. “They’re not being held accountable to anyone.”