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AlterNet: How much will that surgery cost? Hospital prices remain largely unhelpful.
AlterNet - How much will that surgery cost? Hospital prices remain largely unhelpful.
Daniel Chang And Andy Miller, KFF Health News
April 02, 2025
It’s a holy grail of health care: forcing the industry to reveal prices negotiated between health plans and hospitals — information that had long been treated as a trade secret. And among the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump signed during his first five weeks back in office was a promise to “Make America Healthy Again” by giving patients accurate health care prices.
The goal is to force hospitals and health insurance companies to make it easier for consumers to compare the actual prices of medical procedures and prescription drugs. Trump gave his administration until the end of May to come up with a standard and a mechanism to make sure the health care industry complies.
But Trump’s 2025 order is also a symbol of how little progress the country has made since he issued a similar directive nearly six years ago. Consumers find it only partially useful, and the quality of the information is spotty.
A ‘Bold’ First Step That Fizzled
The 2019 order was “pretty bold,” said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “They basically went at the providers and the plans and said, ‘All this data you think is confidential we’re not going to make confidential anymore.’”
What followed was, to consumer advocacy groups, a disappointment. Hospitals and insurers posted on websites voluminous, complex, and confusing data about their prices. The information has been a challenge for even experts in health care pricing to navigate, let alone consumers. Some members of Congress filed legislation to put the force of law behind price transparency requirements; those bills died. And President Joe Biden’s administration was criticized for not more stringently enforcing the regulations, with one consumer advocacy group even buying a Super Bowl ad featuring the rapper Fat Joe alleging that “hospitals and insurers hide their prices.”
/snip
Daniel Chang And Andy Miller, KFF Health News
April 02, 2025
It’s a holy grail of health care: forcing the industry to reveal prices negotiated between health plans and hospitals — information that had long been treated as a trade secret. And among the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump signed during his first five weeks back in office was a promise to “Make America Healthy Again” by giving patients accurate health care prices.
The goal is to force hospitals and health insurance companies to make it easier for consumers to compare the actual prices of medical procedures and prescription drugs. Trump gave his administration until the end of May to come up with a standard and a mechanism to make sure the health care industry complies.
But Trump’s 2025 order is also a symbol of how little progress the country has made since he issued a similar directive nearly six years ago. Consumers find it only partially useful, and the quality of the information is spotty.
A ‘Bold’ First Step That Fizzled
The 2019 order was “pretty bold,” said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “They basically went at the providers and the plans and said, ‘All this data you think is confidential we’re not going to make confidential anymore.’”
What followed was, to consumer advocacy groups, a disappointment. Hospitals and insurers posted on websites voluminous, complex, and confusing data about their prices. The information has been a challenge for even experts in health care pricing to navigate, let alone consumers. Some members of Congress filed legislation to put the force of law behind price transparency requirements; those bills died. And President Joe Biden’s administration was criticized for not more stringently enforcing the regulations, with one consumer advocacy group even buying a Super Bowl ad featuring the rapper Fat Joe alleging that “hospitals and insurers hide their prices.”
/snip