Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill into law Tuesday requiring health care providers to disclose the median cost of medical services, tests and procedures at the request of customers.

The law, which garnered bipartisan support in both the Assembly and Senate, also requires health care providers to publish the costs of their most common services on an annual basis.

A statement released from Doyle’s office said the new law will help consumers get price estimates before a procedure, as well as help them make apples-to-apples comparisons on prices.

“Nowhere else are people asked to buy a product before they know what the price is,” Doyle said in the statement. “This bill is a practical step forward that will help people better understand what their health care costs are before making important health care decisions.”

Signing the bill into law signaled the end of a particularly long and tenuous legislative process, but in the end both sides of the aisle expressed satisfaction.

“A bipartisan group of legislators have been working on this thing for three or four years,” Rep. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, a co-sponsor of the bill said. “There’s only so much time and so much energy in a legislative floor period, and for the individual legislator, so this was great.”

But not everyone is happy with the end result, especially those health care providers who already have transparent pricing mechanisms in place.

“We’ve been doing price transparency…on a regular basis for probably four or five years,” Daryl Applebury, CFO of Gundersen Lutheran Health Services, said. “It’s more bureacracy piled onto the health care system at a time when we’re trying to reduce costs.”

Applebury also stressed the inability of many health care providers to adapt to the new law quickly and efficiently, as the same regulations will apply to both large health care facilities and small practices.

“Throughout the industry, there will be a lot of organizations that aren’t prepared for this and will likely have to do a lot of things differently, especially physician practices, one of the areas least capable of making the switch,” Applebury said.

Supporters of the bill maintain that its aggregate positives outweigh any short-term negatives.

“This will help us control health care costs long-term, because people who utilize this system will be able to make decisions about quality and cost, which is difficult to do right now,” Cowles said.

Doyle also took the opportunity to urge legislators to pass a bill extending BadgerCare Plus Basic at no cost to taxpayers. Due to budget shortfalls, over 30,000 people are currently on the waiting list for the BadgerCare Core program, and the Basic bill provides a level of coverage to the uninsured for a $130 monthly premium.