Brett Guthrie: Biden Admin Weakened Landmark Trump Healthcare Rule

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement on Thursday that he will work with President-elect Donald Trump to strengthen his healthcare agenda and lower healthcare costs.

In 2020, Trump finalized a groundbreaking Health and Human Services (HHS) Department rule that requires hospitals to disclose their negotiated prices to health insurers.

Requiring price transparency has been viewed as a crucial way to lower healthcare costs. In 2024, then-Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) referred to the idea as “bigger than Obamacare.” Braun’s advocacy for price transparency even earned a bipartisan partner — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“For decades, hospitals, insurance companies, lobbyists, and special interests have hidden prices from consumers so they could drive up costs for you,” Trump said in 2019 when announcing his healthcare price transparency rule. “And you had no idea what was happening. You’d get bills that were unbelievable and you have no idea why.”

The rule could potentially lower healthcare costs drastically, as roughly a third of the nation’s $4.9 trillion in healthcare spending went to hospital care expenditures, reaching $1.5 trillion in 2023.

Actuaries from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported a 10.4 percent increase in spending compared to 2022 when hospital care spending rose by just 3.2 percent. The actuaries called that rate of spending growth the “fastest since 1990.”

However, despite the potential for cutting healthcare spending, groups such as Patient Rights Advocate (PRA) have said that the Biden administration rolled back the Trump transparency rules and allowed hospitals to post algorithms instead of prices.

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“This Biden CMS basically allowed the hospitals to obfuscate and continue to hide prices,” said Cynthia Fisher, the founder of PRA. “We’ve lost major ground on what is our right by law to know the actual prices up front.”

An oversight group for HHS found that 37 out of 100 randomly sampled hospitals did not comply with the regulations, although PRA estimated that roughly 80 percent of 2,000 hospitals did not follow the rules on price transparency.

“We believe the policies finalized … will greatly improve the transparency of payer-negotiated rates, including whether the hospital’s standard charges should be interpreted by the user as a dollar amount, or if the standard charges established by the hospital can only be expressed as a percentage or algorithm,” the CMS said in a statement to Politico, disputing PRA’s findings.

Molly Smith, the vice president for public policy at the American Hospital Association, which is challenging Trump rules in court, said Americans do not truly want to price shop their healthcare services.

She said, “There are just so few services for which patients truly either can or want to go around and do a price comparison. Patients really … just want to have a sense in advance of ‘what is this going to cost me?’”

Despite the hospital association’s skepticism toward the Trump rule, many Republicans hope the incoming administration will strengthen one of Trump’s signature healthcare reforms.

Charlie Katebi, a top healthcare expert at the America First Policy Institute, said at a recent panel that he hopes the Trump administration will crack down on noncompliance.

Guthrie, as the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, will have significant sway over healthcare reform.

“The American people deserve to know to the cost of services as they make health care decisions. Despite the first Trump Administration’s efforts, the Biden-Harris Administration slow walked — and even weakened — price transparency initiatives,” he told Breitbart News. “I will work with President Trump and his team to strengthen price transparency protections for patients.”