Healthcare Reform

Price Transparency

Hospital price transparency has been federal law since January 1, 2021, and CMS significantly strengthened the requirement in a rule effective January 1, 2026 (enforcement began April 1, 2026) — hospitals must now post actual dollar prices rather than estimates, with a hospital's CEO or senior official personally attesting to the data's accuracy. The law exists. The problem is enforcement: penalties have historically been too low relative to a large hospital system's revenue to function as a real deterrent, and compliance tracking has been inconsistent across CMS's own reporting. Our fix builds on what already exists rather than reinventing it: penalties that scale with hospital system revenue instead of flat caps, and folding hospital compliance status into the Public Transparency Dashboard (see Public Trust) so noncompliance is publicly visible in real time rather than buried in a CMS enforcement database most patients will never find.

Interstate Insurance Competition

Breaking up regional monopolies increases consumer choice and drives down premiums. More competition means better coverage at lower cost — the same principle that works everywhere else in a free market.

The standard objection to this idea is worth answering directly: simply allowing insurers to sell across state lines has a mixed track record, because an insurer's cost structure depends on the provider network it negotiates in each state — a plan licensed in a low-regulation state still has to build (or rent) a network of doctors and hospitals wherever the patient actually lives. Competition on paper doesn't guarantee network competition on the ground. The fix is pairing interstate sales with federal minimum network-adequacy standards, so a plan can't compete purely by offering a thin, low-access network at a lower price — it has to compete on a real network and a real price.

Focus on Preventive Care

Metabolic health, nutrition education, and outcome-based incentives for healthcare providers. Addressing root causes reduces long-term costs dramatically and improves national well-being across the board.

Prescription Drug Pricing — The Public Funding Rule

If a pharmaceutical company receives any federal funding — directly or indirectly, including grants, NIH research, or university lab work that contributed to development — then all drugs produced by that company are capped at a 100% margin over production costs. R&D costs are excluded from the cap calculation. The company still profits. They simply cannot charge $400 for a pill that costs $0.50 to produce when taxpayers funded the research that made it possible.

Drugs developed entirely with private capital, no public funding at any stage, remain free market with no cap. An enforcement arm of the FDA audits production costs independently — companies cannot reclassify R&D expenses as production costs to game the threshold.

The obvious risk with this rule is that pharmaceutical companies simply avoid federally-funded research partnerships going forward to escape the margin cap — which would be counterproductive, since publicly-funded basic research underlies most major drug breakthroughs. The rule is scoped to prevent that: the margin cap applies only to the specific drug that used the federal funding or research, not to a company's entire product line. A company that accepts NIH funding for one compound doesn't lose pricing freedom on its unrelated portfolio — it only gives up the ability to charge monopoly prices on the specific product the public helped create.