Health insurers and non-grandfathered group health plans — including employers' self-insured health plans — are supposed to use the formats to create and post machine-readable files showing what they really pay for in-network care and the allowed amount for out-of-network care.

The departments also posted guidance emphasizing that hospitals are supposed to post their actual prices, including the prices they charge patients who are using specific payers to pay for their care.

The transparency push is the result of a health care price transparency order President Donald Trump posted in February.

Related: Trump calls for stronger enforcement of health care price posting rules

In the order, Trump called for strengthening price transparency orders and regulations his administration put out during his first term in the White House.

What it means: If the new transparency push works, benefits advisors and benefits managers may soon be able to get a lot more of it more easily.

Brokers and managers who are not sure what to do with 10-gigabyte files may be able to get new, improved price analysis tools for regular people from health price organizations like Turquoise and Fair Health.

The backdrop: Patient advocates and others have been talking about the importance of health care data standards and access to health care data, including price data, for decades, and health data standards rules are a core part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

The transparency and data standards push got a big boost in 2015, when Neal Patterson, the founder and chief executive officer Cerner Corp., a large health data company later acquired by Oracle, testified about the problems lack of standards cause at a hearing organized by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Patterson said that his own wife had breast cancer and that she, like other patients, had to carry bags of her paper medical records from one appointment to another.

A few years later, during Trump's first term, his first CMS administrator, Seema Verma, had to deal with medical records access problems after her husband suffered a heart attack.

Verma then led efforts to develop electronic health record and health care price standards and disclosure requirements.

The politics: Many Republican health policy analysts argue that the best cure for U.S. health care systems is to minimize the involvement of either public health programs or private health insurers in medical care.

They believe that the best solution is to help patients understand the real cost of care, shop for their own care, and use health insurance as a tool for paying large medical bills rather than seeing it as a blank wall protecting them from having to see how health care finance works.

Keith Sonderling, the deputy secretary of Labor, said in a comment about the new data transparency effort that transparency helps people make well-informed health care decisions.

"The departments' actions today execute President Trump's mission to address rising health care costs by promoting competition in the marketplace," Sonderling said.

Employer plan price file standards: Employer-sponsored health plans, health insurers and hospitals are already supposed to post price files.

The files are supposed to be text files, spreadsheet files or other files that machines can easily read and search, not PDF files or other types of files that are difficult for a computer to search.

Regulators asked plans to start by posting data on 500 relatively common items and services starting in 2023 and then to post data on all items and services starting in 2024.

In the real world, officials said, some of the plans that are supposed to be posting machine-readable price files aren't actually doing so.

The organizations that are posting data are using their own formats, and some of the formats make the data provided difficult to understand, officials said.

Officials said the new data standards will help make the files shorter and easier to read. The formatting should be more consistent, and that will also make the files easier to use, officials said.

Request for information: The departments are also asking for comments about federal prescription drug machine-readable file requirements in a new request for information that will appear in the Federal Register shortly.

One question in the request-for-information document asks whether there are any improvements in disclosure requirements that be particularly useful to employers.

Comments will be due 30 days after the official Federal Register publication date.

The agencies have also posted rules meant to make more consistent, more complete and easier to use.