Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Add quality measures to hospital price transparency rules

Not started

470 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“Strengthen hospital price transparency. In 2020, CMS completed its rule to require hospitals to post the prices of common hospital procedures. Future updates of these rules should focus on including quality measures.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The hospital price transparency rules were updated, but not with quality measures. The CY 2026 OPPS/ASC final rule (effective 2026-01-01) tightens what hospitals must publish about standard charges and how CMS enforces it, keyed to the CMS Hospital Price Transparency Data Dictionary; Executive Order 14221 (2025-02-25) had told the agencies to require actual prices rather than estimates and to make the data comparable. Both are about price data. The Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating and the outpatient quality reporting programs are updated in the same rule but remain separate programs, and the CY 2027 OPPS proposed rule's request for information on strengthening price transparency data (2026-07-07) again asks about standardization, not quality. Progress is measured on this ask: nothing joins price to quality.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The price transparency sections of FR 2025-20907 were read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-11-25/html/2025-20907.htm; the finalized changes are attestation, data-accuracy and machine-readable-file specification requirements.
  • Queries: Federal Register “Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information” since 2025-01-20 → 10 documents, the whole price transparency trail of the window; “reference-based pricing” → 4.
  • #1267 owns the codification ask on the same subject and is attempted; this item owns the quality measures ask and is not.
  • Regulatory agenda, checked 2026-09-01. Checked against the full HHS agenda on reginfo.gov (183 active RINs in the 2026 Unified Agenda, published 2026-08-14), not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. The nearest entry is recorded here; it does not name this ask’s object, so the Status is unchanged — an agenda entry that states a general goal in the ask’s subject area, without naming the thing asked for, does not move the Status.
    • 0938-AV64 (Transparency in Coverage, CMS-9882, final action 07/2026) amends the 2020 payer rule, not the hospital rule; 0938-AV83 (CY 2027 Hospital Outpatient PPS and ASC Payment, CMS-1850, NPRM 07/2026) is the vehicle that carries hospital price-transparency changes, and its entry describes rates, the inpatient-only list phase-out and the OQR/ASCQR quality programs without connecting the two. “Price transparency” appears in none of the 183 abstracts, so no entry proposes to put quality measures into the hospital rule.
Action
expand
Object
hospital price transparency rule
ID
1292