The White House announced the Great American Healthcare Plan on January 15, 2026, and it marks a long-overdue correction to one of healthcare’s most perverse features: information asymmetry. For decades, the only person in the room who hasn’t known the price of the service they are buying is the patient. That’s not a market—it’s a black box. President Trump’s plan throws it open.
At its core, the plan demands maximum transparency from stakeholders across the healthcare system. Importantly, this is a plan that can start to be put into action now.
The Great American Healthcare Plan mandates that actual prices, not just estimates, are shown to patients up front—and goes even further, requiring that those prices be prominently posted in plain English. For many years, there have been efforts to legally require hospitals and insurers to reveal prices, but the medical industry has fought them tooth and nail. Hospitals and insurers have resisted disclosure at every turn, protecting profits while leaving patients in the dark. This plan changes the balance of power.
This plan takes direct action on many critical aspects of price transparency, but also opens the door for another way to achieve price transparency. By mandating price disclosures for providers and insurers that accept Medicare/Medicaid, the administration has found the system’s pressure point. Government-funded plans are not a niche corner of the market. This approach provides a smart path toward universal transparency.
All the largest insurance companies have multiple lines of business; in addition to providing employer-sponsored plans, they also offer Medicare and Medicaid. The new plan gives the government a hook: If you want the billions of taxpayer dollars we provide, you have to follow our transparency rules for your entire operation.
They leverage matters. Nearly 98 percent of private insurers have at least some footprint in the Medicare/Medicaid space. Once transparency becomes the price of entry, resistance becomes far less attractive than compliance and it becomes much harder for the industry to fight back against universal transparency.
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The plan also helps tackle another driver of rising costs: consolidation. Today, nearly 80 percent of the health insurance market is controlled by a few vertically integrated entities that combine insurance and pharmacy arms into one huge corporation. It would be an administrative nightmare for these behemoths to maintain plain English transparency for their insurer lines of business and use hidden jargon for their pharmacy benefits. It means the light that shines on insurers would be bright enough to inevitably illuminate the rest—showing how they manage their drug prices, too.
By tying transparency to participation in government programs, the administration makes noncompliance a business-ending risk. For most insurers, losing Medicare or Medicaid would be a death sentence. Transparency could become effectively mandatory without needing to hire a single new federal inspector. That is a market-based solution that could be driven by the sheer volume of federal spending.
So do we still need new legislation? The answer is an emphatic yes.
While the White House’s plan could allow the use of a federal funding hook to enforce rules and to make transparency permanent, Congress must act. That’s where the bipartisan Patients Deserve Price Tags Act, introduced by Senators Marshall and Hickenlooper, comes in. While the Great American Healthcare Plan’s transparency provisions are expansive, the Senate bill goes further, expanding mandatory price transparency to include ambulatory surgical centers, laboratories, and imaging centers, and requiring hospitals to post prices for all services, not just the current 300 that are described as shoppable. It also provides strict penalties, with fines in the several-million-dollar range for willful non-compliance.
The Great American Healthcare Plan is radical common sense. It demands price transparency across the board—for hospitals, insurers, PBMs, and all the middlemen who currently benefit from opacity. It demands maximal transparency, not data dumps. But we can’t forget that the work isn’t done. The administration’s actions are an essential bridge to healthcare transparency. The Patients Deserve Price Tags Act is the legislative engine that makes those changes permanent.
The president has done his job. Now Congress needs to do its part as well.
Dr. Monique Yohanan, MD, MPH, is a senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women.
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