President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order designed to reinforce an older executive order issued during his first term that requires hospital to publish their prices online, a rule that most hospitals have yet to comply with more than five years later.
In June 2019, Trump issued an executive order directing multiple federal departments to enact rules requiring hospitals to disclose prices that reflect what patients and insurers “actually pay” for services. The rule has been in effect since the start of 2021.
Although the directive welcomed by health care access advocates, hospitals have been slow to adopt the requirements. The most recent hospital price transparency compliance report from the nonprofit PatientRightsAdvocate.org, published in November 2024, found that only 21.1 percent of hospitals that were reviewed were in full compliance. This represented a sharp decrease from the prior report, in which 34.5 percent of hospitals were in full compliance.
“Hospitals and health plans were not adequately held to account when their price transparency data was incomplete or not even posted at all,” Trump wrote in his executive order. “The Biden Administration failed to take sufficient steps to fully enforce my Administration’s requirement that would end the opaque nature of drug prices by ensuring health plans publicly post the true prices they pay for prescription drugs.”
According to PatientRightsAdvocate.org’s November report, requirements that went into effect in 2024 essentially rolled back pricing transparency requirements by permitting estimates and averages instead of dollars-and-cents prices.
Trump addressed this in his order, stating that hospitals must disclose “actual prices of items and services, not estimates.”
His further stated it is the policy of the U.S. “to put patients first and ensure they have the information they need to make well-informed healthcare decisions.”
In order to reinforce his rule, Trump’s executive order called for the secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of Labor and the secretary of Health and Human Services to “take all necessary and appropriate action to rapidly implement and enforce the healthcare price transparency regulations.”
Appropriate actions, as defined by the executive order, include issuing updated guidance to ensure pricing information is standardized and that hospitals comply with the rule.
