Well, here’s a shocker—hospitals and insurance companies have been getting away with highway robbery for decades, and no one in Washington seems all that interested in stopping them. The entire healthcare system operates like a bad joke: you walk in for a procedure with no idea what it’s going to cost, and then a few weeks later, a mysterious bill arrives that looks like it was calculated by throwing darts at a board. And if you try to get a straight answer beforehand? Good luck.
This insanity is precisely why groups like Solidarity HealthShare are pushing for real price transparency, and they’re calling on two rather unconventional figures—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Elon Musk, the new government efficiency czar—to actually do something about it. Turns out, 92% of Americans support hospitals and insurance companies being required to provide real, upfront pricing. That’s basically as close to unanimous as you’ll ever get in politics, yet hospitals and the bureaucrats enabling them still refuse to comply.
Solidarity’s president, Chris Faddis, argues that the free market could bring down healthcare costs—if patients actually knew what they were paying before they got the bill. Imagine if airlines charged you after your flight, without telling you the price beforehand, based on some arbitrary and opaque calculation. You’d have people getting billed $20,000 for an economy seat while the person next to them paid $200. Sounds absurd, right? Well, that’s exactly what happens in healthcare.
Trump saw the problem and actually tried to fix it. His administration implemented the Hospital Price Transparency Rule, forcing hospitals to post their prices for 300 common procedures for both insured and cash payers. And surprise, surprise—hospitals mostly ignored it. By 2024, only 21% of them were actually following the law. Biden’s response? Instead of enforcing the rule, his administration watered it down to let hospitals get away with even more vague, misleading pricing.
Instead of hard numbers, they could just post estimates, averages, or even arbitrary formulas—none of which help the patient figure out what they’re actually going to pay. And because the rules didn’t require hospitals to display this data in a way that was easy for actual humans to read, the information was practically useless.
Why do hospitals and insurance companies love this system? Because it keeps patients in the dark, lets them jack up prices without pushback, and makes it nearly impossible for people to shop around. Faddis hit the nail on the head: “Once you have to talk about it directly, all of a sudden, prices come down because I can’t charge you to your face $100,000 for something that costs $10,000.” When people actually see the price tag before the procedure, they start asking questions—and that’s exactly what the healthcare industry doesn’t want.
If hospitals were forced to be transparent, patients would suddenly realize that identical procedures can vary tenfold between doctors’ offices. People could catch errors, challenge inflated bills, and—heaven forbid—make informed decisions. This would also put downward pressure on Medicare and Medicaid costs, which are among the biggest drivers of government spending. Funny how that works—when people are actually responsible for their own spending, costs tend to go down.
Healthcare costs skyrocket because bureaucrats protect hospital monopolies & block price transparency. Trump’s 2019 exec order forced hospitals to post real prices—Biden’s team slow-walked enforcement while Big Pharma & insurers pocketed billions.
The Health Care PRICE…
— DOGEai (@dogeai_gov) February 24, 2025
This is exactly what happened in higher education. The government started throwing unlimited student loan money at universities, and—what do you know?—tuition skyrocketed. Because when students aren’t the ones feeling the direct financial impact, colleges have no incentive to control costs. The same is true in healthcare. Patients are so disconnected from the actual prices that hospitals can charge whatever they want, knowing that insurers and the government will pick up the tab.
If Washington was serious about reducing healthcare costs, they’d start by making price transparency mandatory and enforceable. But we all know why that hasn’t happened. Hospitals and insurance companies are making too much money off this system, and politicians—especially the ones in Biden’s orbit—are more interested in protecting them than helping patients.
The question is whether Kennedy and Musk, two outsiders who aren’t beholden to the usual special interests, can actually push through meaningful reform. Because one thing is for sure—if nothing changes, Americans will keep getting blindsided by outrageous medical bills while hospitals and insurers laugh all the way to the bank.
