Federal rules have forced hospitals and insurers to publish negotiated rates since 2021. An Employee Benefit News opinion column argues the remaining work — actually using that data — now sits with HR and benefits teams.

The piece, headlined "Washington is improving the supply of healthcare prices. Demand is up to the rest of us," runs in EBN's recurring "Benefits Think" commentary slot. It targets HR and benefits leaders directly. Its argument cuts one way. Regulator-led transparency efforts have built more price data than employers, brokers and consultants have begun to use. The supply side caught up. The demand side hasn't.

What did Washington deliver?

Two federal rulemakings anchor the column's premise. The hospital price transparency rule, effective January 1, 2021, requires hospitals to publish standard charges online. The Transparency in Coverage rule, phased from July 2022 through 2024, pushes group health plans and insurers to post negotiated rates for in-network providers and allowed amounts for out-of-network care.

The combined output: machine-readable rate files across most major carriers and acute-care hospitals. CMS has issued hundreds of warning notices and corrective action requests to noncompliant hospitals since 2021, lifting compliance rates. Multiple third-party aggregators now repackage the data into searchable tools. The column treats that stack as the supply side of a market that hasn't formed on the other side.

What does HR owe the demand side?

That shifts concrete work onto HR, total rewards and benefits operations. Three pressure points define the work:

• Vendor selection and contracts. RFPs for carriers, TPAs and navigation vendors now require a defined workflow: how does pricing data reach members, and how does it steer them to lower-cost sites? Contracts should require specific deliverables — monthly rate-file ingestion, member-level cost estimates, and steerage reports tied to actual claims. Vendor demos now face a tighter test than glossy slides.
• Steerage strategy. Reference-based pricing, centers-of-excellence programs and direct-provider contracts all depend on clean rate files and a process for comparing them across regions. A 30-mile radius comparison of facility costs only works if the published files are clean.
• Annual renewals and benchmarking. Plan reviews should compare negotiated rates against published benchmarks before the carrier signs. The step now requires a comparative output: which carrier pays less for the same service in the same geography? It should also produce a steerage plan for the highest-cost service categories — imaging, outpatient surgery, infusion therapy — where published rate variance runs widest.

Self-funded employers carry the deepest obligation, since they negotiate directly with carriers each year. Fully insured groups see less of the raw data. They lean on brokers to surface pricing differences — which puts a sharper accountability test on the broker relationship itself.

Where does this leave 2026 plan design?

The commentary treats purchaser adoption as the missing leg of the price-transparency stool. Federal enforcement pushed providers and carriers to publish. What didn't follow is consistent employer behavior — using those published rates to drive carrier selection, network design and member steerage at scale.

The piece lands as benefits teams enter 2026 plan design with tighter CFO scrutiny on medical trend and a heavier compliance load. It lands, too, with brokers and consultants pitching services that claim to do exactly this work. That crowds HR's inbox with overlapping claims about "transparency-powered" cost savings. Sorting those claims becomes its own project — and a measurable test of whether the demand side has caught up.

The column's final word is a warning, not a forecast. The federal supply side is mostly built. The rest of the work sits with the buyers — and 2026 plan cycles will show whether they used it.