UNBIASED Politics (2/27/25): Trump's 'Gold Card' Proposal, Supreme Court 'Reverse Discrimination' Case, WH Press Team to Control Press Pool, Trump Recruited as Russian Spy? And More.
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Welcome back to Unbiased, your favorite source of unbiased news and legal analysis. Welcome back to Unbiased Politics. Today is Thursday, February 27th. Let's talk about some news, starting with this healthcare pricing transparency order signed by the president on Monday. This order is called Making America Healthy Again by empowering patients with clear, accurate, and actionable healthcare pricing information. Here's the thing. This order is not necessarily new because it actually builds off of a previous executive order from the president's first administration. So let's talk about it. As always, the order has a policy and then a directive. So first, it is the policy of the United States to put patients first and ensure they have the information they need to
to make well-informed healthcare decisions. The order goes on to explain that the federal government will promote universal access to clear and accurate healthcare prices and strive to improve transparency requirements. Now, for the directive to carry out that policy, the order tasks the Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of Health and Human Services with implementing and enforcing healthcare price transparency regulations within 90 days. Specifically, it lays out the following actions. One, require the disclosure of the actual prices of items and services, not estimates to issue updated guidance or proposed regulatory action, ensuring pricing information is standardized and easily comparable across hospitals and health plans.
And three, issue guidance or proposed regulatory action updating enforcement policies designed to ensure compliance with the transparent reporting of complete, accurate, and meaningful data. Now that last action is arguably the most important because as I said in the beginning of the story, the policy set forth in this order is not actually new. Essentially this order is is calling for a framework to be made that will enforce an executive order from Trump's first administration. The original executive order was signed June 24th, 2019. It was called Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First. And that original executive order required hospitals to maintain a consumer-friendly display of pricing information for up to 300 shoppable services. It required hospitals to maintain a machine-readable file with negotiated rates for every single service a hospital provides.
It required health plans to post their negotiated rates with providers, post their out-of-network payments to providers, and the actual prices paid for prescription drugs, and it required health plans to maintain a consumer-facing internet tool, making price information accessible. So naturally, you might be wondering, okay, so if the president did something similar in the past, what's the need for the new order? Well, a non-profit that fights for system-wide healthcare price transparency called Patient Rights Advocate released a report in November of 2024 after reviewing 2,000 hospitals and found that only 21% of those 2,000 were in full compliance with the requirements to publicly post a list of prices for common treatments and services.
Furthermore, during the Biden administration, 15 hospitals were fined for noncompliance, and as of October, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had issued about 1,600 warning notices to hospitals not in compliance with transparency requirements. and while we're rattling off these numbers the new executive order cited in economic analysis from 2023 which estimated the impact of these regulations if fully implemented could result in as much as 80 billion dollars in health care savings for consumers employers, and insurers by 2025. The order also cited another report from 2024, which suggested healthcare price transparency could help employers reduce healthcare costs by 27% across 500 common healthcare services. So that explains a little bit about the purpose of this order. But finally, let's ask the question, will this order be challenged?
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