Nearly one year into his tenure as health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to provide maximum health care price transparency for Americans.
At a Heritage Foundation event on Monday, the secretary hinted at a new interactive website that will make health care prices transparent nationwide, which the secretary claims will create price competition and lower health care costs.
At the “One Year of Making America Healthy Again” event at The Heritage Foundation, Kennedy explained that Americans will be able to use the site to compare prices at all hospitals, medical centers, and concierge services in their area to choose where they want to receive the needed service.
The secretary said he had used the demo site himself; he looked as if he were a pregnant woman in Manhattan trying to decide where to have her baby.
“A mile around Manhattan there are 30 hospitals, and each one has a different price. The lowest price was $1,300, the highest price was $22,000, and everything in between,” he described.
Joe Gebbia, the U.S. chief design officer, and “genius designers that come in from Silicon Valley,” Kennedy said, are designing the new website.
“Consumers will have a choice that will drive down the cost of health care,” Kennedy said.
“We’re also making the insurance companies post what they reimburse and what the provider gets for every procedure and illness, and that is going to dramatically lower prices,” Kennedy continued.
“All of these systemic changes are ultimately, I think very quickly, drive down the cost of health care in this country and provide transparency and affordability to Americans,” he concluded.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in 2019 mandating health care costs to be disclosed prior to treatment, and the Trump administration is also making price transparency and affordability a priority in his second term.
“[Trump] passed a price transparency legislation that the Biden administration almost never enforced,” Kennedy said at The Heritage Foundation. “Now we’ve changed the regulation so that every hospital is going to comply,” he continued, threatening that if not, the hospitals will face enormous fines.
Kennedy went on to detail how providential his role in this administration has been. “I was censored and shut down,” he recounted. “I prayed every single day that God would put me in a place where I could fix this.”
“President Trump said to me, ‘I want to make every American the CEO of their own health,’ help them make their own, and make them intelligently, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Kennedy concluded.