President Donald Trump's Federal Trade Commission just delivered a straightforward message to some of America's largest hospitals: Patients deserve to know what they're paying for.
The FTC announced that it had sent a letter to the nation’s largest for-profit hospitals warning that they must give patients accurate pricing information.
Anyone who’s ever had surgery knows that determining the true cost of a medical procedure can be a headache. Hospitals will sometimes send patients sky-high bills only to slash the cost if confronted, while the price of the same treatment can vary widely between locations.
Thankfully, price transparency has been a major priority of the Trump administration. It’s a window into how Trump is restoring antitrust policy after the left hijacked it for its own ends.
The Trump team’s antitrust approach is to actually help consumers while making sure law-abiding businesses can compete and thrive. This is in contrast to the left, which under Joe Biden treated antitrust as a club to bludgeon businesses it didn’t like.
Upon entering office, Trump restored the consumer welfare standard, which holds that the government should only intervene in a business deal or merger if consumers stand to be directly harmed. This holds regulators to a measurable and commonsensical standard rather than the untethered activist stance favored by Democrats.
Under Trump, the FTC has tended toward careful litigation against big companies where it’s clear consumers have suffered real damage. The agency secured a landmark $2.5 billion judgment against Amazon, for example, because the company manipulated tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime service and then made it difficult to cancel.
Crucially, the FTC didn’t go after Amazon because it dared to grow and compete with its rivals. It went after Amazon because it deceived consumers.
The problem wasn’t economic success but unlawful dishonesty. That’s the difference between Trump and the socialists.
What the Trump team seems to want is a more transparent marketplace that sends the signals necessary for robust competition while ensuring consumers always know where they stand. The emphasis is on growth, and the results speak for themselves, with the economy having grown during every quarter of the Trump presidency except Q1 of 2025.
All this has driven Democrats around the bend. They’ve become so desperate, they’re actually trying to wrest antitrust powers away from the federal government.
Attorneys general in blue states have stepped up to file frivolous lawsuits against companies the Trump administration refuses to prosecute. When the Department of Justice approved a merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. — a far better deal than the initial proposal between Netflix and Warner — Democrats spent months fighting it in court.
A recent article in Politico made clear that these renegade AGs are trying to undermine Washington’s role as antitrust cop. “This means companies and policymakers will need to contend with state attorneys general with interests that diverge from the federal government’s — and sometimes from each other,” Politico reports.
In other words, the AGs are creating more redundancies and red tape. Some of them have asked their state legislatures for more funding so they can sue more businesses, a circumvention of the policy changes Americans voted for in 2024 and a waste of taxpayer money.
In addition to state-level ambulance chasers, left-wing interest groups have also been throwing stones at Trump’s FTC. The American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) was founded by a former Biden antitrust staffer, and while it pretends to support economic populism, its main goal is to undermine real-life populism.
The AELP joined the crusade against Spirit Airlines’ attempted merger with JetBlue, which sealed Spirit’s doom and deprived fliers of an affordable budget airline. They pushed hard for “price discrimination” lawsuits against companies that offer budget discounts to stores like Walmart and Costco, which would have driven up prices on the most vulnerable.
The AELP unwittingly reveals the ugly truth about the left-in-exile’s antitrust push: it’s not just anti-business but anti-consumer. The most overregulated markets — the ones where the government is most likely to sue — are also the ones dominated by cartels that jack up prices. This is the inevitable result of both Democrats’ lawsuits and the AELP’s activism.
Trump’s rescue of antitrust from the socialists has been one of the most refreshing things about his presidency. He should ignore the left-wing hangers-on and keep pushing for a more predictable and fair business climate.
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