“We’re going to post that, all the prices for everything,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared at a recent event held by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.
It’s a bold-sounding promise, and a familiar one; politicians from both parties have been repeating it for years now. Both Trump administrations — and the Biden administration in between — have taken whacks at making medical prices more accessible, with the goal of empowering patients to shop for better deals.
The idea makes intuitive sense. Why shouldn’t you be able to compare the prices of MRI scans, for instance?
The feds have made some strides. Prices are available, albeit in confusing or fragmentary form. But there’s one big problem: “There’s no evidence that patients use this information,” said Zack Cooper, a health economist at Yale University.
Health care is an inherently complicated marketplace. For one thing, it’s not as simple as one price for one medical stay. Two babies might be delivered by the same obstetrician, for example, but the mothers could be charged very different amounts. One patient might be given medications to speed up contractions; another might not. Or one might need an emergency cesarean section — one of many cases in medicine in which obtaining the service simply isn’t a choice. Plus, the same hospital typically has different contract terms with each insurer, making comparing prices even more difficult for patients.
Instead of helping consumers sort things out, this federally mandated price data largely has become a tool for providers and insurers, looking for intel about their competitors — so they can use it at the negotiating table in a quest for more advantageous rates.
“We use the transparency data,” said Eric Hoag, an executive at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, noting that the insurer wants to make sure health care providers aren’t being paid substantially different rates. It’s “to make sure that we are competitive, or, you know, more than competitive against other health plans.”
For all those tugs-of-war, it’s not clear these policies have had much of an effect overall. Research shows that transparency policies can have mixed effects on prices, with one 2024 study of a New York initiative finding a marginal increase in billed charges.
Price isn’t the only piece of information negotiations hinge on. Hoag said Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota also considers quality of care, rates of unnecessary treatments, and other factors. And sometimes negotiators feel they keep up with their peers — claiming a need for more revenue to match competitors’ salaries, for example.
Hoag said doctors and other care providers often look at the data from comparable health systems and say, “‘I need to be paid more.’”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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