President Donald Trump ordered the Departments of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services to develop a framework to enforce hospital price transparency, within 90 days.
Trump originally established the rule during his first term in office, but compliance and enforcement under the Biden administration were weak.
Trump signed the new “Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information” executive order (EO) on February 25. The order directs the administrative departments to develop an enforcement plan to ensure hospitals disclose “actual prices, not estimates” and make “prices comparable across hospitals and insurers, including prescription drug prices.”
“Our goal was to give patients the knowledge they need about the real price of healthcare services,” the White House Fact Sheet on the EO quotes Trump as saying. “They’ll be able to check them, compare them, go to different locations, so they can shop for the highest-quality care at the lowest cost. And this is about high-quality care. You’re also looking at that. You’re looking at comparisons between talents, which is very important. And then, you’re also looking at cost. And, in some cases, you get the best doctor for the lowest cost. That’s a good thing.”
Price transparency is one of the nine reforms listed in “The 2024 American Health Care Plan (State Solutions)” report published by The Heartland Institute, which co-publishes Health Care News.
State Initiatives
Frustrated by the Biden administration’s lack of enforcement, the states of Colorado in 2022 and Ohio in 2024 took hospital price transparency into their own hands. They prevented hospitals from collecting on unpaid bills if their prices were not disclosed in a “comprehensive machine-readable file.”
Cynthia Fisher, founder and chairman of PatientRightsAdvocate.org, says the EO is a welcome measure.
“Real prices will forever transform the American health care system,” said Fisher. “Price transparency unleashes competition and shifts the power to the true purchasers of care—patients, employers, and taxpayers—allowing them to lower their costs and be protected from overcharges.”
Patient Rights Advocate (PRA) studied hospitals across the country last year and found a little more than 21 percent were in full compliance with the rules, well below the 34 percent compliance rate in 2023.
“Real, true price transparency by posting actual prices and not estimates is going to force hospitals to compete on prices and quality,” Ilaria Santangelo, director of research at PRA, $3,00.
$3,000 v. $300
An independent economic analysis found full implementation of the regulations in the EO could save consumers, insurers, and employers $80 billion this year alone, the EO states.
“Why would anyone pay $3,000 for an MRI when they could get the same quality for $300?” said Fisher. “Likewise, no patient would agree to pay a $12,000 colonoscopy bill when the fair market price is around $1,000.”
AnneMarie Schieber ([email protected]) is the managing editor of Health Care News.
AnneMarie Schieber is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Health Care News, Heartland’s monthly newspaper for health care reform.
