Executive Order 13877, signed on June 24, 2019, directed the Department of Health and Human Services to establish rules requiring hospitals to publicly disclose their standard charges for medical items and services, and mandating that health insurance companies reveal negotiated rates and estimated out-of-pocket costs to patients. The executive order invoked the president's authority to improve healthcare transparency without requiring Congressional approval, making it one of the administration's few healthcare initiatives framed around consumer information access rather than coverage restrictions.
The order's direct beneficiaries were intended to be patients seeking to understand healthcare costs before receiving treatment. In practice, however, the effects proved limited. While some hospitals began publishing price lists following the directive, compliance remained inconsistent and uneven across the healthcare system. Many published lists were difficult for patients to navigate or access, buried in hospital websites or presented in formats that obscured rather than clarified actual patient costs. Insurers incrementally increased availability of cost-estimation tools, but widespread patient access to negotiated rates—the rates insurers actually pay providers—remained restricted during the Trump administration, undermining the order's stated goal of price transparency.
The transparency initiative stands somewhat apart from the administration's other healthcare actions, which have generally restricted patient access to treatments and services. While subsequent Trump administration policies de-emphasized birth control provision through Title X, shifted CDC vaccine recommendations away from established preventive care, and created barriers to abortion medication access, Executive Order 13877 ostensibly aimed to empower patients with information. Yet even this relatively consumer-friendly approach reflected a market-based ideology favoring individual shopping over systemic reform—an approach that proved inadequate to overcome the complexity of American healthcare pricing or the structural incentives hospitals and insurers have to obscure costs.
The executive order has remained active and largely unchallenged in court, making it one of the more durable healthcare actions from the Trump administration. Reversing it would require executive action by a successor administration, though strengthening and enforcing the transparency requirements would demand significant regulatory expansion and enforcement resources that were never fully deployed during the administration that created them.
Executive Order 13877: Healthcare Price and Quality Transparency
🏥 Healthcare · First Term (2017–2021) · 🤖 AI-categorized
Executive Order 13877 was signed on June 24, 2019, requiring hospitals to publicly disclose standard charges for items and services, and requiring health insurers to disclose negotiated rates and out-of-pocket costs to patients. The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services to establish rules requiring price transparency. Confirmed effects include: hospitals began publishing price lists (though compliance varied and many lists remained difficult to access), and insurers incrementally increased availability of cost-estimation tools, though widespread patient access to negotiated rates was limited during the Trump administration.