Increased Transparency Will Help Decrease Healthcare Costs

Manufacturers are committed to providing health insurance to their employees, but opaque pricing throughout the healthcare system continues to strain the sector—and must be addressed at the policy level, the NAM told Congress this week.

What’s going on: “While increased transparency is not a silver bullet to lower healthcare costs, it would provide greater data accessibility, which will help manufacturers and patients make more informed decisions,” the NAM told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health ahead of a Tuesday hearing.

• While 95% of manufacturing workers are eligible for health benefits through their employer, nearly 70% of manufacturers cited rising healthcare costs as a primary business concern in the NAM’s Q2 2026 Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey. And for small and medium-sized manufacturers, the need to temper rising healthcare costs is even greater.

What should be done: Legislators, the NAM said, shouldpull back the curtain on opaque prices in the healthcare industry in the following ways to increase insurance affordability:

• Ensure manufacturers have access to user-friendly data and price transparency: “Updates to the hospital and insurer pricing files mandated by the No Surprises Act and transparency measures included in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 will make data more usable by plan sponsors, which will put better data in the hands of beneficiaries.”
• Enact additional reforms to pharmacy benefit manager practices: The administration and Congress have made great strides in reining in PBMs, the middlemen that drive up costs for employers and patients, but the current system still incentivizes PBMs to hike drug prices. To break this cycle, policymakers must do more to delink PBM compensation from drug list prices in the commercial market.
• Fix the 340B drug pricing program: Congress should “address current fee structures, third-party administrator behavior, subgrantee eligibility, patient definition, child site eligibility and the ways in which patients benefit from the program when considering reforms to the 340B program.”

The last say: By taking these steps, Congress will help “ensure manufacturers can continue to offer health insurance to their workers, and their families, who work hard every day to power the American economy,” NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Jake Kuhns and NAM Director of Health Care Policy Jess Wysocky said.

Dive deeper: Check out the NAM’s recently released roadmap for health care policy here.