Publication
Healthcare Price Transparency Executive Order Mandates Enforcement
By Paul Giancola, Claudia E. Stedman, and Savannah Wix
On Tuesday, February 25, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order aimed at promoting healthcare price transparency (the 2025 Executive Order).1 The 2025 Executive Order mandates that certain federal departments must update enforcement policies within 90 days to ensure hospitals and insurers comply with price transparency requirements established by a prior Trump administration executive order.
In 2019, during his first term, President Trump issued an executive order requiring health insurers, physicians, hospitals, and others in the healthcare industry to disclose certain pricing information for health services (the 2019 Executive Order).2 Specifically, the 2019 Executive Order required hospitals to maintain a consumer friendly display of pricing information for up to 300 shoppable services, as well as a machine readable files with negotiated rates for every service provided. Additionally, under the 2019 Executive Order, health plans were instructed to post their negotiated rates with providers, their out of network payments to providers, and the actual prices paid for prescriptions drugs, and to maintain an online tool to permit consumers to access price information.
The 2025 Executive Order instructs the Secretaries of the Departments of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services (the Departments) to “take all necessary and appropriate action to rapidly implement and enforce the healthcare price transparency regulations issued pursuant to” the 2019 Executive Order within 90 days of the issuance of the 2025 Executive Order.3 This directive requires the Departments to update their enforcement policies to ensure compliance and will mean that healthcare entities must disclose actual prices, not just price estimates.
While the prior Trump administration price transparency rules became enforceable in 2022, a November 2024 study surveyed 2,000 hospitals, and found that only 21.1 percent of those hospitals had fully complied with the rules implemented under the 2019 Executive Order. Currently, civil monetary penalties for hospital noncompliance range from $300 to $5,500 per day depending on hospital capacity. To date, CMS has fined 18 hospitals for these violations, with penalties ranging from $44,000 to $979,000.
In light of this new executive order for enforcement, hospitals, insurers, and self-insured group health plans should consider engaging legal counsel to ensure prompt compliance with forthcoming price transparency rules prior to any forthcoming enforcement actions to mitigate risk of penalties.
Snell & Wilmer will continue to monitor developments in this area, including the issuance of any new enforcement guidance and regulations related to price transparency.
**Any opinions expressed are the authors’ and not the firm’s or the authors’ colleagues.
Footnotes
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Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information, Exec. Order (2025) (available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/making-america-healthy-again-by-empowering-patients-with-clear-accurate-and-actionable-healthcare-pricing-information/).
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Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First, Exec. Order No. 13877, 84 Fed. Reg. 30849 (2019) (available at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/27/2019-13945/improving-price-and-quality-transparency-in-american-healthcare-to-put-patients-first).
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Seventh Semi-Annual Hospital Price Transparency Compliance Report, Patient Rights Advocate (Nov. 2024) (available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60065b8fc8cd610112ab89a7/t/673c995127e9990b5f10dea8/1732024706191/PRA+Nov+2024+Hospital+Price+Transparency+Compliance+Report.pdf).
About Snell & Wilmer
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