Trump officials enact final revisions to medical transparency rule

The Trump administration issued a final revision to its preexisting price transparency rules on Monday, the last step in making healthcare data and pricing information accessible to public users. Americans should know how much medical procedures will cost before they receive them, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told reporters at a Monday press conference. The final rule would help employers make informed healthcare decisions for workers, allow researchers more insight into the healthcare industry, and foster a free and open healthcare market, he said. Americans pay for the healthcare system, so they deserve to know prices, he added. Simply put, the final rule would expose prices, make healthcare data usable, and hold hospitals responsible for violating the transparency standards, Kennedy said.

Didn’t Trump already enact price transparency during his first term? The revisions debuted on Monday would improve and perfect the administration’s initial 2020 policy requiring hospitals and insurance groups to release all pricing data, according to Kennedy. The data healthcare providers started publicly releasing was thousands of pages of raw pricing data deemed unreadable by most people because of its complexity, Kennedy said. Thousands and thousands of pages of the data were also unnecessarily redundant, he added.

The new rules would cut down on redundant data listing and simplify how the data is presented. The final rules would reduce clutter and make it easy for people to learn how much a procedure will cost, Kennedy said. No other industry expects people to undergo a service without knowing the price ahead of time, and informing the public of healthcare prices should be free and easy, he added.

Kennedy pointed to healthcare data from Boston, Mass., as an example of the issue. Data showed that a hip replacement at one hospital in the city cost $17,900 and somehow the same procedure cost $74,000 at a different hospital nearby, Kennedy said. He also pointed to instances of care prices negotiated by insurance companies costing more than the flat rate for an uninsured person paying out of pocket. The final rules would allow companies to see and compare how well insurers negotiate prices, and individuals will be able to make more informed decisions about their health, Kennedy explained.

The final rule would also make spotting healthcare fraud easier, said Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, who appeared alongside Kennedy. Oz warned all hospitals and insurance groups cutting corners that officials would flag them. Data under the final rule will start rolling out in December 2027, which will support competition within the healthcare field and lower costs for consumers, which is the American way, Oz added.

Dig deeper: Read Addie Offereins’ report in WORLD Magazine on whether the free market will fix hefty medical costs.