Ready for more confusion?
Consistent with the President’s Executive Order 14221, “Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information,” on Dec. 19, 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in partnership with the Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury (collectively, the Departments) jointly proposed changes to the payer price transparency regulations to improve the accessibility of pricing disclosures to participants, beneficiaries, and enrollees, and the standardization and reliability of the public pricing disclosures from non-grandfathered group health plans and health insurance issuers offering non-grandfathered group and individual health insurance coverage.
These proposed changes build on the historic disclosure requirements the Departments issued in the Transparency in Coverage final rules on November 12, 2020 (the 2020 final rules) in line with the President’s June 24, 2019, Executive Order (EO) 13877, “Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First.”
This fact sheet discusses the proposed provisions of the Transparency in Coverage proposed rule (CMS-9882-P) that would amend the 2020 final rules. The proposed rule can be accessed via the Federal Register at: https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2025-23693/transparency-in-coverage
Maybe someday, maybe, Americas will stop all this nonsense about healthcare, look around the world and realize the answer is a single payer, universal system to make healthcare accessible to all citizens of all abilities and sophistication. We are our own worst problem insisting we can be consumers of healthcare and all will be well … which of course, does nothing to assure everyone has insurance coverage. 🥵
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Like the VA but for everyone to walk in?
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No, like Medicare that works for 60+ million Americans and has for sixty-years. The concept is not universal healthcare, but health insurance, that’s it, that simple.
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Universal health insurance is basically a universal healthcare scheme. The medical profession would be de facto employees if paid only through the government issued card.
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No it isn’t. That’s like saying they are employees of insurance companies. However, no doubt they would oppose such a move, at least initially, but given what they have to deal with now, they would see the benefits eventually. Of course, the fee schedules would be higher than current Medicare to make it viable.
I’m open to any viable alternative that provides universal coverage and fair distribution of risk and costs and not variable based on where you live or work.
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“… I’m open to any viable alternative that provides universal coverage and fair distribution of risk and costs and not variable based on where you live or work. …”
However, the challenge is that your definition of “fair” does not match other’s definition of “equitable”. Fair means treating me as I think I should be treated. It is an individual determination. To me, health care coverage has ALWAYS cost me TOO MUCH – given my health and that of my family members, and our historical spend. It is why I was so grateful that the C-suite approved my proposal to add HSA-capable coverage in April 2004, effective January 1, 2005. I was a participant in that HSA-capable plan until I commenced Social Security benefits and started Medicare at age 67 and 3 months in 2019.
For a universal health system to work, and be sustainable, it must be EQUITABLE, not FAIR – that is, it must achieve both horizontal equity (treating similarly situated people the same) and vertically equity (treating differently situated people differently). For Democrats, they think of equity as an income or wealth variable.
However, when it comes to health insurance (not health care itself), differences are measured with risk of loss. That is true for most other insured risks as well.
Unfortunately for you, no Democrat who favored the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Health Reform), nor any Democrat who favored the American Rescue Act of 2021’s super duper extra unnecessary subsidies for public exchange coverage for the years 2022 – 2025, was at all interested in making risk appropriate allocations of premium or out of pocket, point of purchase cost sharing.
They were, and continue to be, nothing more than vote buyers – running massive deficits and wanting to increase the deficit spending to buy votes today – sending the bill to generations too young to vote and generations yet unborn.
What you want has no constituency in America. While most Americans would prefer to have someone else pay, they are willing to shoulder the nominal direct cost of employer sponsored coverage (their contributions), even though most don’t know they shoulder the full cost of their own coverage (the company contribution is a reduction in wages), and most don’t know that they pay just as much or more for other people’s coverage (Medicare, Medicaid, VA).
https://aequumhealth.com/blog/thanks-for-subsidizing-other-peoples-health-coverage/
However, the majority of Americans who are in Medicaid, the public exchanges, and the uninsured only want the best health care coverage YOUR money will buy. That is, they won’t buy health insurance that is properly priced for the risk – they will only enroll (and some won’t even enroll in coverage without cost)rage where the premium is mostly paid or fully paid by someone else.
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