Building on Positive Price Transparency and Consumer Protection Efforts in West Virginia

Introduction

At the federal level and in West Virginia, there is broad, bipartisan consensus around the need to address unaffordable health care prices and give consumers, employers, and medical professionals the information they need to propose and make informed health care decisions.

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In 2025 alone, West Virginia state lawmakers introduced eight bills to strengthen consumers’ rights and increase health care price transparency. This comes on the heels of a federal price transparency rule put forth by President Donald Trump that researchers estimate could result in consumer savings as high as $80 billion each year once fully implemented. West Virginia can build on federal efforts and its own momentum to enact meaningful price transparency efforts during the 2026 legislative session.

How Can West Virginia Strengthen Price Transparency for Consumers?

In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order focused on improving health care price and quality transparency, which resulted in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requiring hospitals to post prices for 300 of the most “shoppable” procedures, goods, and services they provide. These requirements were continued under President Joe Biden and, subsequently, President Trump again.

While federal efforts have somewhat increased price transparency, research shows limited compliance among hospitals nationally and in West Virginia, where only 10 percent of hospitals were in compliance according to a 2023 analysis.

Further, given that federal administrative rules and executive orders do not carry the weight of law, future federal administrations could rescind, eliminate, or undermine it. This presents a strong need for states to codify and strengthen the federal hospital transparency rule. Three bills related to this were introduced in the WV Legislature in 2025. While those bills were a strong start, state lawmakers might consider ways to strengthen them during the 2026 state legislative session.

Any state price transparency legislation should:

• Include, at a minimum, the 300 services hospitals must already publish in order to comply with CMS rules;
• Expand price transparency requirements beyond hospitals to more sites to include outpatient and ambulatory surgical centers, labs, physicians, and dental providers;
• Enhance compliance and enforcement capacity by imposing a state-level penalty for non-compliance; and
• Prohibit sites that are out of compliance from pursuing unpaid medical debt from consumers.

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