In a new executive order, President Trump will reaffirm his commitment to one of his favorite health care policies of his first term: His push to make the prices paid for medical services more public and transparent.
Mr. Trump will sign the order on Tuesday afternoon, according to a White House official. After years of halfhearted compliance from hospitals and insurance companies with the previous policies, Mr. Trump is signaling a more aggressive approach to enforcing the rules and making pricing data accessible to patients, the official said.
Health care prices have historically been shrouded in secrecy, negotiated in private between doctors, hospitals, drug companies and the insurance companies that pay their bills. The parties in those negotiations have fought hard to keep those numbers out of public view, saying that confidentiality is key to their bargaining process. Economics literature — which relied heavily on a study of Danish concrete prices in the 1990s — has suggested that making them public could actually backfire, by increasing health care prices.
But with two major rules issued jointly by the departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor during his first term, Mr. Trump tried to force the industry to become more transparent. One rule required hospitals to publish the prices they charged to various insurers for a set of common services. Another required insurance companies to publish a more comprehensive listing of the prices they had negotiated with various health care providers.
Industry compliance has been grudging, slow and marked by extensive litigation. After the rules became final in 2021, many hospitals simply declined to publish the required lists. Others tried to make their price information hard to find. The Wall Street Journal reported that several had inserted code into their web pages listing prices that made the pages impossible to find using an internet search engine.
Nevertheless, the requirement did provide new information to researchers, employers and some patients about the nature of health care prices — and their wide and often inexplicable variation. The policy has so far not delivered on one of Mr. Trump’s key promises from his last term, that price transparency would significantly drive down health care costs. Health care prices have continued to rise.
The new executive order will task H.H.S., Treasury and Labor with considering new ways to expand the reach of current initiatives, but it does not call for much in the way of specific new policy. Any meaningful new transparency initiative would require regulatory action or legislation, or both. But the signing of the new order does suggest that Mr. Trump has not forgotten about this priority, which he often referred to in his first term as “bigger than health care itself.”
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