The White House released The Great Healthcare Plan yesterday as an available new policy framework, “calling on Congress to enact” a set of healthcare changes. The key documents from the announcement are brief and available here: the White House Fact Sheet and the two-page plan document.

Early media coverage has been skeptical on near-term impact and heavy on “lack of detail” critiques (see The Guardian, plus additional reporting from Forbes and The New York Times).

Even with that skepticism, there are real policy signals in the plan. The transparency language is unusually direct for a White House release, and it pushes beyond “publish machine-readable files” toward shoppability, comparability, and accountability measures.If fully enacted, the proposals would expand transparency reporting in two ways. First, more organizations would need to report, including new types of healthcare organizations, insurance segments, and services. Second, plans would need to report new information about denials, medical loss ratios, and other behaviors.

Below are the takeaways we think matter most.

Expanded Price Transparency Requirements for Non-Hospital Providers

The plan uses broad language (i.e., “any healthcare provider… who accepts Medicare or Medicaid”) and calls for “pricing and fees” to be prominently posted (with the fact sheet specifically pointing to posting in a “place of business”). Up until this point, provider-side disclosures have been focused primarily on hospitals and health systems, and this reads as an attempt to bring more of the outpatient care delivery system into a transparent market.

This also aligns with where bipartisan legislative pressure has been headed. For example, the Marshall–Hickenlooper Patients Deserve Price Tags Act proposes to explicitly expand transparency requirements to clinical diagnostic laboratories, imaging providers, and ambulatory surgery centers, including website posting requirements and standardized formats to make the information comparable.

Expanded Price Transparency Requirements for Insurers

The insurer side positions in the plan are more explicit and website-first. The plan calls for a “Plain-English” insurance standard, requiring insurers to publish clearer comparisons of rates and coverage terms on their websites. It also calls for publishing the percentage of revenue paid out to claims versus administration or profits (i.e., medical loss ratios), and publishing claim rejection rates and average wait times for routine care.

The open question is scope. The framework says “insurers” and also ties obligations to “accepts Medicare or Medicaid,” but it does not define whether this explicitly includes Medicare Advantage plans or Medicaid managed care plans and, if it does, what the compliance mechanism looks like relative to current schema requirements for commercial plans under the Transparency in Coverage regulations.

Transparency Shifts From Disclosure to Shoppability

The phrase “post prices on the wall” (and the fact sheet’s “place of business” framing) is not subtle. It suggests the Trump administration is aiming for a patient journey that looks more like normal retail: walk in, see a price, understand the terms. Easier said than done! 

The practical problem is that healthcare isn’t uniformly shoppable. One workable implementation pattern, if policymakers actually want a consumer experience that functions, is a two-lane approach: services that can be priced up front should be priced up front, and everything else needs a clear estimate standard that is usable, enforceable, and hard to game.  That’s not defined in the framework, but it’s the core design constraint.

Drug Pricing and Transparency Continue to Advance on Multiple Tracks

The plan continues to elevate drug pricing as a central cost lever, including Most-Favored-Nation-style concepts and supply/competition messaging. CMS recently announced several new Innovation Center drug pricing models targeting high cost drugs in Medicare, including GUARD, BALANCE, GLOBE, and GENEROUS. Additionally, 16 drug manufacturers have now negotiated with the Trump administration for custom pricing arrangements intended to be carried forward under the Great Healthcare Plan. 

Separately, Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) transparency appears to be already in motion through a federal rulemaking process. A proposed rule titled “Improving Transparency into Pharmacy Benefit Manager Fee Disclosure” is listed in the federal pipeline and its public record shows multiple EO 12866 meetings in December 2025. Regardless of where the broader framework goes legislatively, this is a concrete sign that PBM fee disclosure is being actively staffed as an agency priority.

Transparency Policy Shifts to Access and Enforcement

The framework’s transparency push is not just “publish more.” It’s “publish in a way consumers can use, and in ways that make intermediaries measurable.” Denial rates, wait times, and medical loss ratio reporting are all new accountability metrics; demands for ‘Prices on the Wall’ and easier comparisons are signals for consumer activation moves.

And while parts of this framework would require congressional action, the Trump Administration does not need Congress to make further progress on certain transparency mechanics. CMS has already proposed major changes to payer price transparency requirements that are squarely about usability and auditability: reducing duplication and junk data, adding context like utilization files and change logs, and tightening reporting standards. If you want our deep dive on how transparency forward through the rulemaking process, start with our late-2025 TiC proposed rule breakdown here.

The Takeaway

The White House’s plan is a framework, with no near-term impacts in terms of federal healthcare policy. But the signaling is clear: transparency is being positioned as a core lever for cost containment, affordability, and insurer oversight, with a stronger emphasis on consumer usability and measurable accountability for both payers and providers.

If proposed expansions to transparency requirements advance either through federal rulemaking or Congressional action, the details that matter most remain unanswered: what must be posted, where it must be posted, how it will be standardized, and how enforcement will actually work. The next phase will be less about whether transparency exists and more about whether it is comparable, auditable, and capable of changing behavior. We’ve been tracking the same directional shift in CMS’ 2025 payer and hospital rulemaking: moves from “more disclosure” to requiring more usable, auditable data. This framework reads like it’s trying to extend that idea even more broadly across the US healthcare system. 

At Serif Health, our focus is to turn every transparency disclosure into reliable, comparable reimbursement intelligence so teams can make decisions with confidence. We’ll continue to publish insights on our blog and highlight how payer rates data shows up in live MRFs via our payer inventory.

If you’re interested in applying price transparency data, we’d love to connect. Please reach out to hello@serifhealth.com or schedule a demo. Also feel free to check out our sample data on our web platform Signal.