The latest health care rate hikes for New Jersey’s public employees are nothing short of devastating. Despite labor consistently coming to the table in good faith, negotiating year after year to secure the most cost-effective benefits plans for both our members and taxpayers, participants in the New Jersey State Health Benefits Plan (SHBP) are now facing yet another double-digit increase. In fact, some members have seen a staggering 59% rise in costs over just the past three years.

These aren’t just numbers on a page — these are firefighters, state workers, and other public servants, many of whom are wondering, like so many in New Jersey, how much longer they can afford the health care they desperately need.

It’s a catastrophe for public employees, and it’s the perfect example of a broken system. These costs aren’t skyrocketing because our members are using more health care. In fact, utilization has remained steady. So why are costs soaring? While our health care system can be mind-numbingly convoluted, the key driver for our rising costs is pretty straightforward: runaway hospital pricing. We are paying more and more for hospital care without getting more care or better quality in return.

This issue isn’t limited to public employees. All New Jersey residents who rely on health care are grappling with the same skyrocketing hospital prices. From 2016 to 2021, price inflation drove a 36-44% effect on inpatient and outpatient hospital costs, while utilization had a negative 8% effect on costs, based on a long-awaited and recently released Health Care Spending Trends report. The SHBP rate hikes pass along these unjustified inflationary price increases to public employees. But make no mistake — everyone with health care in New Jersey is feeling the squeeze. And this is by design — the hospital association opposes almost every health care spending reform all while nonprofit hospitals get millions of dollars in tax breaks.

It’s past time for a solution that addresses the root of the problem: the unchecked power of hospitals to negotiate prices with no transparency and no accountability. That’s why the New Jersey Coalition for Affordable Hospitals, a partnership of labor unions, health care providers and community organizations, is working to bring real reform to a segment of the industry that has lurked in the shadows for far too long. Together, we’re pushing for legislation that will inject transparency into hospital pricing and establish enforceable benchmarks to slow down this relentless cost escalation.

We need legislation that will strengthen New Jersey’s Office of Health Care Affordability and Transparency (OHCAT) and create an independent Health Care Cost Containment and Price Transparency Commission. This commission would have the authority to set and enforce price growth benchmarks for hospitals, holding them accountable through performance improvement plans and civil penalties when they exceed those benchmarks.

The commission would also require hospitals to submit accurate, timely data about their prices and a failure to do so would result in actual accountability. We need to codify federal hospital price transparency rules into state law and require hospitals to prove their compliance in an annual report made available to the public, the Legislature and the governor. This means hospitals that continue to evade transparency rules would be held accountable, and patients could be protected from medical debt incurred at noncompliant hospitals.

These regulations are not about dismantling hospitals, they’re about ensuring hospitals operate in a fair way with reasonable prices. Hospitals are critical to our communities, but we cannot allow them to continue to raise prices unchecked, knowing that people have no choice but to pay whatever they demand. Without reform, the situation will only worsen and public employee unions will, year after year, bear the burden of our failed, anticompetitive system.

New Jersey can look to states like Oregon and Massachusetts, which have successfully implemented hospital accountability measures. This problem can be fixed; we just need the will to do it. By empowering the Office of Health Care Affordability and Transparency and establishing real cost growth benchmarks, we can make health care more affordable for everyone in the state, not just public employees.

The stakes are too high to wait any longer. We need New Jersey’s legislators to act now and pass meaningful health care reform. Public employees, whose contracts provide a window into the scale of this issue, are just the tip of the iceberg. As we have said before, every New Jerseyan who relies on health care is impacted by the same shattered system.

We all know that health care is not optional, it’s essential. That’s why we need to regulate it in a way that ensures both accessibility and affordability. Our members, public employees, work hard every day to serve their communities, but how can they continue to do so when health care costs are eating more and more of their paychecks?

We need transparency, accountability and real limits on price increases, but we can’t do it alone. This issue affects all of us — public sector, private sector, health funds and everyday people in between who feel the pinch of out-of-control hospital prices and rising health care costs.

It’s time for us to join forces and demand the change we all know is overdue. The Coalition for Affordable Hospitals has laid out a clear path forward, and by working together, we can bring hospital prices under control, not to harm our hospitals, but to protect the very people and communities they are meant to serve. Let’s unite in this effort to ensure health care remains accessible and affordable for everyone.

Steve Tully, executive director of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and Ana Maria Hill, New Jersey state director of 32BJ Service Employees International Union (32BJ SEIU), also contributed to this op-ed.