The most recent executive order President Donald Trump has signed aims at improving price transparency on healthcare costs. He plans to do so by directing federal agencies to enforce a 2019 order he signed during his first term.
The order states that health care providers must disclose “actual prices of items and services, not estimates.”
A recent report from PatientRightsAdvocate.org, a non-profit organization, revealed that only 21.1 percent of the hospitals it reviewed fully complied with the order Trump signed during his first term.
“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.”
Further, Trump aims “to put patients first and ensure they have the information they need to make well-informed healthcare decisions.”
Speaking of the executive order, the president said, “It is one of the biggest things that can happen to reducing cost and healthcare.
“It takes a little while to kick in but Biden ended it immediately upon coming in which was a terrible travesty in my opinion.
“We are going to start up and we have even made it stronger by a couple of major factors.
He added that it allows people to go out and negotiate prices. “You can’t even talk about it when you visit a hospital and see a doctor.”
“This allows you to go out and talk about it and it is actually one of the biggest… there are a couple of people that go back a long way that feel that there are real pros of this, this is the biggest thing you can do for cutting prices.”
Further, he said he’s well aware that this order will not suit hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, but it will certainly suit those that receive the medical care.
When Trump signed the initial executive order back in 2019, hospital groups not only opposed it, but they also challenged it at court.
They claimed the order violated their First Amendment free speech rights, and undermined competition. The court rejected the claim.
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