Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Watch All Shows Victor Davis Hanson Tony Kinnett Daily Signal Signal Sitdown

Home – Healthcare & Policy News – To Fix Health Care We Need Prices, Not Price Controls

To Fix Health Care We Need Prices, Not Price Controls

Stephen Moore | Phil Kerpen

You can’t have a market without prices, which is a major reason why health care is such a mess.

Nobody knows what anything costs, even though the vast majority of medical services are not emergencies. In President Donald Trump’s first term, he took this problem on by mandating that hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid (all of them do, of course) post their prices. But compliance was poor, and under President Joe Biden there was little enforcement.

That is finally changing, with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz taking point and issuing federal warning notices or corrective action plan requests to at least 519 hospitals since April for hiding what they charge patients. Penalties can hit $2 million a year. Good start.

Trump signed the original price transparency executive order back in 2019. Biden inherited it and let hospitals ignore it for four years. A 2024 federal audit found that only 46% of hospitals required to comply were actually doing so. Biden’s response was essentially a shrug. Once he came back into office, President Trump has not only signed another executive order but has also made clear that fines are coming.

The noncompliance list recently published by The Associated Press is striking. Texas leads the nation with 42 flagged hospitals. California has 38, and Indiana—despite its far smaller population—has 34. Major hospital systems........

© The Daily Signal