Speaker Julie Menin and 32BJ President Manny Pastreich Team Up to Highlight New Healthcare Accountability Report

Report reveals hospital consolidation and increasing care service prices as major drivers of rising healthcare costs

Findings also show fewer than 3 percent of commercial insurance claims are appealed internally, despite the fact that appeals tend to win one third of the time

NEW YORK - Today, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and 32BJ President Manny Pastreich appeared jointly in a new video highlighting the Healthcare Accountability Report, which was recently published by the NYC Office of Healthcare Accountability (OHA). The report, which examines the drivers of rising healthcare costs, found that pricing - not how much care consumers use - remains the primary cause. The analysis also uncovered extreme price variation in hospitals across the city.

Healthcare costs in New York City are rising faster than wages and inflation, and are a major financial burden for many New Yorkers. The annual Healthcare Accountability Report provides context on major healthcare affordability issues, uses public data to analyze the financial practices of hospitals and insurers, and offers detailed price transparency data on both hospitals and payers, in addition to City spending on employee, retiree, and dependent healthcare.

In the video, Speaker Menin and Pastreich underscore the importance of consumer transparency. The full video can be found here, and the full 2026 OHA Report can be found here.

"When you go to the hospital, you don't know what you'll be charged for a service or procedure. For consumers, there is no other industry where you're procuring a service-much less in the hospital at your most vulnerable time-and have no idea what it'll cost," said Speaker Julie Menin. "New Yorkers should never have to choose whether or not to get the care they need simply because they can't afford it. Transparency brings down costs, and this year's OHA report arms New Yorkers with the critical information they need about the cost of health procedures so they can make better informed decisions about the care they receive. I'm grateful to 32BJ for their partnership in making healthcare more affordable for New Yorkers across the city."

"Knowledge is power. This new report helps put the power back into people's hands by exposing the outrageous prices and growing hospital consolidations that drive up healthcare costs," said Manny Pastreich, President of 32BJ. "It's clear that less competition allows big hospitals to buy up the market, leaving everyday New Yorkers stuck with paying higher prices. While this report brings greater transparency to our hospital pricing system, accountability must be our next step. That's why 32BJ strongly supports implementing the stakeholder convening provisions of Local Law 78 and has been championing the Fair Pricing Act in Albany. I commend Speaker Menin for passing the legislation that created the Office of Healthcare Accountability which produced this report and for her continued leadership and support for greater healthcare affordability."

Key findings from the report reveal:

• Hospital prices for identical procedures range dramatically across New York City. For example, a C-section can cost anywhere from $7,000 to $64,000 depending on the hospital, and an emergency room visit can range from $210 up to $6,000.
• Nearly 70% ($3 billion) of the City health plans' 2025 spend on hospital benefits were concentrated in the five largest NYC academic medical centers (Montefiore Health System, Mount Sinai Health System, NewYork Presbyterian, Northwell Health, NYU Langone Health).
• Among the City's own health plans, outpatient care spending outpaced all other categories, rising 13-17% in just one year, with that growth clustered at two hospital systems. This is compared to inpatient care spending, which only rose 4-5% in the same period.
• The average marketplace premium reached $909 per month in 2025, jumping 20% over two years. Meanwhile, the City's total spend on employee and retiree premiums reached $10.03 billion in Fiscal Year 2025, up 15% over the past two years.
• The denial rate of commercial insurance claims in 2024 was around 25% - or one in every four claims - with fewer than 3% of those denials being appealed internally even though appeals win up to a third of the time.
• In 2024, New York City's nonprofit hospitals reported $10.6 billion in community benefit spending - 20% of total expenses. At the same time, large academic hospitals continue to treat fewer Medicaid and uninsured patients than public and safety-net hospitals.

"As we prepare to negotiate the citywide economic agreement for city workers, we want to ensure more money goes back into our members' pockets than in the pockets of hospital CEOs," said Henry Garrido, Executive Director of District Council 37 AFSCME. "Every dollar counts for New Yorkers, and the reports generated by the Office of Healthcare Accountability have been instrumental in recent negotiations with certain hospital systems when benchmarking costs for individual services. We thank Speaker Menin for her partnership and advocacy in sponsoring the Healthcare Accountability and Consumer Protection Act, and look forward to using this new report to make the case for lowering arbitrary hospital prices."

The Office of Healthcare Accountability last year helped the city harness its purchasing power to negotiate a better employee health plan, expanding care while saving taxpayer dollars.

In 2023, then Council Member Menin in collaboration with 32BJ and labor advocacy partners worked to pass Local Law 78, which established the Office of Healthcare Accountability - the first of its kind in the U.S. The office provides recommendations relating to City healthcare and hospital costs, analyzes expenditures on healthcare costs for city employees, provides information relating to the costs of hospital procedures, convenes stakeholders to examine healthcare costs, and collects hospital financial documents and makes them publicly available.

Speaker Menin has long been a champion of consumer protection. As the former Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, she worked to put money back in New Yorkers' pockets, increasing consumer restitution by 70%, implementing the city's historic Paid Sick Leave Law, and launching an Earned Income Tax Credit that returned $260 million to low-income residents.

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