Insurance interests have joined forces to create a new group that is targeting hospitals and blaming them for rising health care costs.

The group, called “Hospital Watch,” was formed last month and describes itself as

… a watchdog group dedicated to shining a light on corporate hospitals as the top culprit in driving up U.S. healthcare costs – exposing corporate hospitals’ monopolistic practices in price gouging patients with excessive markups and hidden fees with no transparency while forcing patients and employers to pay more for their care.

Hospital Watch is the creation of another group, called “Better Solutions for Healthcare,” which in turn is the creation of the American Benefits Council, the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, the BlueCross BlueShield Coalition, AHIP (previously “America’s Health Insurance Plans”), the Public Sector HealthCare Roundtable, and National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals.  That group’s mission statement says that it

… is focused on educating consumers, employers, and lawmakers on the true drivers behind the rising cost of healthcare and providing market-based solutions that lower healthcare costs for Americans.

For both groups, the culprit for the concerns they raise is hospitals.  Better Solutions for Healthcare’s solutions to those problems are to promote hospital competition; to enforce federal transparency laws for hospital charges; to rein in hospital price markups; and to ensure honest billing practices by hospitals.

Hospital Watch, in turn, declares that “Hospital prices are the leading driver behind rising healthcare costs.”

Learn more about the two groups, their objectives, the groups behind them, their proposed solutions, and more from their web sites:  Better Solutions for Healthcare and Hospital Watch, and from the Modern Healthcare article “Insurer-backed ‘Hospital Watch’ targets costs, consolidation” (subscription required).