Will MRF law compliance lead to healthcare cost containment and lower employer spend?

Key takeaways

• HHS sent non-compliance letters to more than 500 hospitals and warned it is "finally getting serious about price transparency"
• Handl Health flags 20–30% of all ingested price transparency rates as outliers; even among the largest carriers, 20–25% of data is rejected
• In the first half of 2026, 11 of 47 network requests failed Handl's data quality requirements
• Compliance and usability are not the same thing—the strongest analysis combines MRFs with claims experience, Medicare benchmarks, and utilization patterns

The second week of June was a busy one for healthcare price transparency.

News came out that the current administration has been sending letters to more than 500 hospitals that are not complying with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service's Hospital Price Transparency law. Then, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee discussed healthcare cost containment. Finally, in a social media message, the Department of Health and Human Services sent out a warning to companies that haven’t been complying with rules regarding healthcare price transparency data: “HHS is finally getting serious about price transparency.”

This push to make sure providers are making their pricing data available is a welcome development. It’s great news that the administration is starting to get more serious about compliance with the CMS requirements for healthcare price transparency, but we must remember that while compliance is one thing, obtaining data that can create real pricing change in the healthcare industry is something else entirely.

Why isn't MRF compliance enough on its own?

When healthcare price transparency regulations first rolled out in 2021 and 2022, the industry became hyper-focused on compliance metrics: Who published MRFs? How many files existed? Which carriers and providers were participating?

That made sense at the time; the assumption was that more published data would lead to a clearer understanding of healthcare pricing. The industry could finally run detailed analysis that compared hospital negotiated rates in large cities or evaluated insurance network rates by procedure. Then we actually started working with the data.

What became obvious very quickly is that compliance and usability are not the same thing. A file existing doesn’t automatically make it useful. Some MRFs contain highly reliable negotiated rate data with strong provider and plan coverage, which is useful for health plan analytics. Others are sparse, inconsistent, structurally difficult to interpret, or are missing enough context that the output becomes misleading if used at face value.

Today, the more important conversation isn’t whether a file was published. It’s whether the data is reliable enough to support real decision-making.

MRFs are not a monolith. Every healthcare pricing MRF varies in terms of data quality and fidelity based on the organization that’s providing the data, the vendor being used to generate the file, and a host of other factors.

That’s why the strongest healthcare pricing analysis tools don't rely on MRFs alone. They combine transparency data with additional context like claims experience, Medicare reimbursement benchmarks, utilization patterns, and normalization logic to build a more accurate view of healthcare pricing.

How much MRF price transparency data is actually usable?

At Handl Health, we routinely come across data that is compliant on its face but can’t be used in any analysis. We typically flag between 20% and 30% of all the price transparency rates we ingest as outliers. Even across some of the largest insurance carriers, Handl typically rejects around 20-25% of the data it receives.

Take a look at the first half of 2026: We fielded 47 requests to add networks into our data set, and 11 did not meet our data requirements. That’s because data was missing, unstable or it just wasn’t strong enough to give us confidence that the rates were accurate.

The only way to achieve lower-cost, higher-value healthcare for Americans is by focusing on generating robust healthcare industry pricing data. That means focusing on MRF regulation compliance and, more importantly, introducing data quality standards that make every MRF complete and usable for price comparisons.

With Handl Health, develop a true employee benefits strategy, from self-funded health plan analytics to non-traditional plan design, and start reducing employer healthcare spend.