Breaking Down Trump's Renewed Push on Price Transparency: John Barkett, MBA

Read the full article; watch the first part of this interview.

Price transparency remains a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s health policy agenda, with recent proposals seeking not only to expand disclosure but also to improve the usability of the data that providers and payers are required to publish, according to John Barkett, MBA, managing director in BRG’s Healthcare Transactions and Strategy practice and former senior policy advisor for Health Care Delivery System Reform on the White House Domestic Policy Council. Building on initiatives launched during the first Trump term and carried forward under the Biden administration, the current push leverages Affordable Care Act authority and refinements to the transparency in coverage rules for group and individual health plans.

Under the administration’s “Great Health Care Plan,” any provider or insurer that accepts Medicare or Medicaid would have to prominently post pricing and fees. For hospitals and physician practices, this could resemble a menu of services and prices visible in their physical locations. For health insurers, the policy vision points toward online tools that allow patients and purchasers to look up negotiated rates for common services.

A key evolution in this latest proposal is its explicit focus on making transparency data more practical. To date, health plans have been publishing enormous machine-readable files—on the scale of petabytes—that are difficult for even sophisticated technology firms to analyze, let alone for individual consumers to use in making care decisions.

The proposed rule would narrow the scope of required disclosures to codes and services that are actually relevant to a given specialty. For example, oncologists would not be required to post prices for knee replacement procedures, since they do not perform those services. By concentrating on commonly prescribed or frequently performed procedures within each specialty, regulators aim to reduce noise in the data and improve its value for price comparison, benefit design, and payment innovation.

These refinements illustrate a decade-long, bipartisan trajectory on price transparency: from establishing basic posting requirements to securing legal authority in court to now optimizing the structure and scope of data so that stakeholders across the managed care landscape can use it more effectively.