Hospitals operate unlike any other business. They often don’t tell you how much a procedure will cost until after it’s completed, when they submit a bill to insurance. Many patients never even see how much something costs. Is it any wonder that healthcare costs have grown far faster than prices in other sectors of the economy?
That’s what one group dedicated to securing affordable medical coverage for Americans wrote to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Elon Musk, who’s been tasked with increasing efficiency in government.
“An overwhelming 92% of people say they support efforts by the federal government to ‘requir[e] hospitals and health insurance companies to provide real, actual prices – not estimates’ before the start of treatment,” Solidarity HealthShare, a Catholic “health sharing” ministry that functions as a co-op-like alternative to traditional health insurance plans, wrote Tuesday.
The group’s president, Chris Faddis, said making medical pricing more transparent is necessary to allow the free market to drive prices down, and that the Department of Government Efficiency has illustrated how data can be used to save money.
Trump’s Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary has made a similar argument, asking what would happen to plane tickets “if airlines billed you after the flight … there would be price gouging all over the place. There would be tremendous waste in the marketplace. … And yet in health care, that’s exactly what we have now.”
Faddis asked Trump’s HHS to enforce the Hospital Price Transparency Rule that took effect near the end of Trump’s first term and required that hospitals post prices for 300 common procedures online, giving prices for both insured and cash payers. Four years later, PatientRightsAdvocate.org found that only 21% of hospitals were fully compliant. Only 26% posted data that passed a validator tool produced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), yet Joe Biden’s HHS hardly penalized any.
A report by Patient Rights found that regulations that took effect during the Biden administration, in July 2024 and January 2025, watered down the initial requirements. They allowed for averages, estimates, percentages, or formulas instead of hard numbers, and allowed important fields to be missing. They didn’t require human-readable web pages, just computer-readable ones — and those didn’t have to follow a uniform format, largely defeating the purpose.
“These findings imply that minimal, lenient enforcement by CMS has led most hospitals to continue to either disregard the rule or fail to adhere to all of its requirements, blocking consumers from being able to compare prices, benefit from competition, and lower their costs,” it said.
Faddis told The Daily Wire that hospitals and doctors can raise prices because they never have to discuss the prices with the person actually receiving the procedure.
“They feel like they can get away with it because they’ve divorced it from having that conversation with your provider. Once you have to have to talk about it directly, all of a sudden prices come down because I can’t charge you to your face $100,000 for something that costs $10,000,” he said.
Having clear communication about costs can also help patients realize if insurance has been erroneously billed for a procedure they didn’t actually receive, fend off surprises when they discover a procedure isn’t covered by their insurance, decide if it makes sense to pay cash due to their plan’s deductible, and choose wisely instead of simply spending freely because it feels like other people’s money, he said. These factors could also drive down costs for Medicare and Medicaid.
Solidarity’s letter said that prices for identical procedures can vary tenfold from one doctor’s office to another, without the patient even knowing it. It said it encounters “waste, fraud and abuse” every day as it strives to find the best deal for its members. Healthcare transparency and accountability could be a popular bipartisan issue that brings down the cost of living.
Medicare and Medicaid expenses are some of the government’s largest, and finding efficiencies there could go further to balance the budget than anything else. Just as federally-backed college loans and subsidies have made the cost of college rise far faster than other goods, because it doesn’t feel like real money, patients are disconnected from the real costs of the healthcare they consume, often shocked to learn how much someone else was billed for what seemed like a minor procedure.