With just days to go until Tuesday’s presidential election, President Trump finalized a new rule Thursday to revolutionize American healthcare.
The order requires health insurers to publish price and cost-sharing information for patient care before it is delivered. These real prices will allow healthcare consumers to shop around for less expensive coverage and better benefit designs, reducing health insurance costs while spurring innovation.
The final insurance rule rounds out Trump’s healthcare price transparency trifecta, which also includes hospital and billing transparency rules. The hospital order, which takes effect in January, requires providers to publish their discounted cash prices and secret negotiated rates for care.
The billing mandate, announced last month, requires hospitals to disclose their ruthless bill collection practices, including lawsuits, wage garnishment and property liens.
Together, these rules will usher in a systemwide competitive and functional healthcare market, putting downward pressure on healthcare and coverage prices.
As most Americans are painfully aware, patients currently don’t know how much they will pay for healthcare until after their bills show up weeks and months later in the mail. This opaque status quo leaves them powerless to resist the healthcare cartel’s pricing prerogatives.
With consumers captive, prices for healthcare and coverage have skyrocketed.
According to new data released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average cost of employer-provided family health insurance in 2020 was $21,300 — a 55 percent increase over the previous 10 years.
The average family deductible is around $8,000. Last month, a RAND report estimated that hospitals charge, on average, about 250 percent more than the rates Medicare pays for the same services at the same facilities.
For many Americans, these sky-high prices mean that they have healthcare coverage in name only. Roughly half of American families avoid care each year because they are afraid of costs.
More than one in six Americans have medical debt in collections. Healthcare costs are devouring the economy, consuming 18 percent of annual GDP.
By shining a light on the industry’s hidden pricing games, Trump’s rules will empower patients with upfront prices, offering financial certainty, discretion, and choices.
Transparent prices will transform healthcare into a consumer-first market resembling auto or home insurance, where value-seeking consumers easily compare premiums, rates, and coverage. To attract consumer dollars, insurers and hospitals will lower prices and innovate.
Economic and real-world evidence suggests that Trump’s price transparency initiatives will cut healthcare costs by 30 to 50 percent.
Last year, economists Art Laffer and Larry Van Horn found that cash prices for care are, on average, about 40 percent lower than insurers’ negotiated rates.
Across the country, innovative businesses have saved this much or more on their healthcare costs by forgoing standard opaque contracts in favor of direct pricing with the small but growing number of price transparent providers.
A JAMA study from last year estimated that 25 percent of U.S. healthcare spending was due to waste, mainly in the form of pricing inefficiencies.
I see this healthcare bloat and price gouging every day as a physician. Efficient markets, generated by Trump’s transparency rules, will deflate this healthcare cost bubble, helping all Americans.
These healthcare savings will turbocharge the economy and accelerate the national recovery from COVID-19. Families and businesses will see less of their budgets diverted to healthcare costs.
Less money feeding the healthcare beast means more devoted to productive spending and wage increases, creating more job and economic growth. Price transparency will lift the healthcare cost anchor weighing down families, businesses, and the nation.
Democrats and the mainstream media claim that Trump has no healthcare reform plan. Yet the president’s actions to usher in systemwide healthcare price transparency speak louder than these words.
Undecided voters who value results rather than rhetoric should consider these revolutionary reforms before they cast their ballots on Tuesday.
