February 2024

Dear Mr. Musk and Secretary Kennedy,

We at Solidarity HealthShare, a healthcare sharing ministry devoted to facilitating the delivery of affordable, holistic healthcare of the highest quality to our members, write to ask that your agencies apply government oversight and accountability on a matter affecting all American patients: healthcare price transparency.

Ask any American who has been to the doctor recently and they will tell you that our nation’s healthcare system puts patients last, not first, every time it imposes hidden fees, surprise bills, and rampant inefficiency and fraud upon those simply seeking essential care.

In fact, an overwhelming 92 percent of people say they support efforts by the federal government to “requir[e] hospitals and health insurance companies to provide real, actual prices – not estimates” before the start of treatment instead of allowing hospitals to charge them for overpriced, depersonalized, bureaucratic treatment options after receiving care as they do now.

Your teams have an exciting opportunity to put America back on the path toward good health and big savings.

To start, we ask that you enforce the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Price Transparency Rule which took effect during President Trump’s his first presidential term. Those rules currently require hospitals to publish the prices of more than 300 common procedures, including MRIs and blood tests in “machine-readable” files online for all patients to see before receiving care. Nearly 80 percent of American hospitals, however, are not complying with these commonsense rules. Kept in the dark by their hospitals, some patients are delaying necessary medical treatment out of fear of unknown costs. Others are paying steep prices due to these hospitals’ misconduct.

Kyunghee Lee, a senior citizen from Ohio, saw her hospital bills skyrocket when her doctor’s office was purchased by a larger hospital system. Without warning, Lee’s annual steroid injection increased in 2021 more than 1,000 percent – from $30 to over $300 – even though her medication, treatment plan and doctor remained the same.

This type of deception and waste would never be tolerated in any other industry. Just imagine “if airlines billed you after the flight,” as surgeon, author and nominee for the Food and Drug Administration Dr. Marty Makary has described. “There would be price gouging all over the place. There would be tremendous waste in the marketplace…And yet in health care, that’s exactly what we have now.”

Patients should not be subjected to these unethical practices from the medical industry for a moment longer.

Since 2016, Solidarity HealthShare has facilitated free-market solutions to healthcare costs for our members in ways that could be implemented on a national scale under your leadership.

Through Solidarity members have access to high quality care that aligns with their values. They can also see exactly how their healthcare dollars were spent at the end of each month through public online sharing reports. We use a reference-based pricing model which reviews individual provider bills and negotiates directly with the provider a fair and reasonable price, free from unnecessary fees and price gouging. In December 2024 alone, Solidarity saved its members 64 percent on their medical bills, proving without a doubt that major savings and transparency are achievable.

Should the president and his cabinet choose to make headway on the bipartisan issue of healthcare transparency and accountability, we are ready to serve as a resource in this area. We would welcome a meeting with your teams at the Department of Government Efficiency and the Department of Health and Human Services to share more about the waste, fraud and abuse we encounter every day as we help our members navigate the current healthcare system.

Patients are rightly fed up with the devastating effects of Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Hospitals Systems on their wallets and wellbeing. It’s time to give Americans the opportunity to access affordable, transparent healthcare.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,