Health Affairs May 25, 2023
The negotiated prices or rates that insurers pay to hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers have long been shrouded in secrecy, with few people gaining access to the data, and those that did bound by confidentiality clauses. On June 24, 2019, then-President Donald Trump issued an “executive order on improving price and quality transparency in American health care to put patients first” with the belief that “making meaningful price and quality information more broadly available to more Americans will protect patients and increase competition, innovation, and value in the healthcare system.”
This regulation had three components. First, hospitals would be required to release machine-readable files with negotiated prices beginning January 1, 2021. Second, insurers would be required to create...