Latest Executive Order on Healthcare Price Transparency Aims To Build on Past Efforts

On Feb. 25, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that aims to make “more meaningful price information available to patients to support a more competitive, innovative, affordable, and higher quality healthcare system.”

The order builds on efforts initiated during Trump’s first term. Since Jan. 1, 2019, hospitals have been required to post their charges online. This information often proves unhelpful to consumers, however, since the amounts charged typically differ from what is actually paid.

Seeking to provide consumers with more useful information, the Trump administration issued an executive order in June 2019 that led to the finalization of a rule requiring hospitals to disclose not only standard charges but also insurer-specific negotiated rates and discounted cash prices. The rule also required that hospitals display 300 shoppable services in a format that consumers can easily understand.

By late 2020, these disclosure requirements were extended to include private health plans. The Biden administration supported these measures and implemented stricter enforcement policies to ensure compliance. Though insurers and hospitals have made progress in price transparency, the core goals of accessibility and practical usability for consumers have not been achieved.

The latest executive order outlines several directives to improve the usefulness of healthcare pricing information. The order directs federal agency action to:

• Require the disclosure of actual, not estimated, prices paid for healthcare items and services.
• Call for standardized, easy-to-compare pricing information across hospitals and health plans.
• Update enforcement policies to ensure comprehensive, accurate reporting of pricing data.

A 90-day deadline has been set for federal agencies to propose updates to these transparency measures. Agencies are likely to propose broadening their scope, possibly to include more services and providers.