Trump Healthcare Price Transparency Order May Not Bring Intended Relief to Patients

A Trump administration executive order intended to provide patients with the prices from hospitals and insurers they need to shop around may prove ineffective because of the huge amount of unorganized data it will generate, experts say.

President Donald Trump first told hospitals to put prices online in 2019 during his first administration and transparency rules for insurers soon followed, as the government sought to lower U.S. healthcare spending, the highest in the world.

But not all prices were posted and consumers struggled to find and analyze the scattered data.

The new order, announced on Feb. 25, aims to fix the previous order's non-specific instructions that led to inconsistent reporting by hospitals and prevented patients from easily accessing cost information, said Gary Claxton, a senior vice president at KFF, a health policy organization.

Still, the additional information may not make the cost data easier for consumers to digest or compare.

To comply with a narrower 2020 rule, insurers reported more than 56 billion prices in 2022, according to a 2023 research report in Health Affairs based on information from health data provider Turquoise Health. Hospitals under a similar rule reported 1.8 billion prices.

The new data will likely not be centralized in one location, impeding patients from finding the best price, said Kolton Gustafson, a principal at healthcare consulting group Avalere.