Sponsors (4)
Official title: Prohibit discrimination in health care and require the provision of equitable health care, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 17, 2025 by Alejandro Padilla · Last progress July 17, 2025
The bill creates stronger enforcement, measurement, and funding tools to reduce health care inequities for protected and underserved populations, but does so at the cost of new administrative burdens, privacy and legal risks, fiscal outlays, and potential access strains for under-resourced providers.
People from racial, ethnic, disability, LGBTQ+, age, and other protected groups gain enforceable rights and remedies against inequitable care: HHS can exclude providers for patterns of inequity, patients can file expedited complaints and sue with potential damages, and enforcement is strengthened.
Hospitals and public health agencies will collect disaggregated demographic and outcome data into a national repository and be required to report equity metrics, enabling targeted interventions and transparent tracking of disparities.
Medicare will require equity-focused measures in value-based purchasing and CMS will be statutorily mandated to track equity metrics, which creates financial incentives for hospitals to improve care for disadvantaged patients.
Hospitals, providers, and state agencies will face substantial new administrative, reporting, compliance, and implementation costs to collect disaggregated data, respond to investigations, and comply with oversight—costs that may be passed to patients or strain under-resourced facilities.
Stronger enforcement (exclusions, litigation risk, and punitive damages) could cause local providers—especially in underserved or rural areas—to lose Medicare/Medicaid participation or exit the market, reducing access to care and local health employment.
Collecting sensitive attributes (sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability) and broad authority to obtain other patients' records raise privacy and trust concerns and risk disclosure of sensitive identifiable health information.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Requires disaggregated outcome reporting, adds equity measures to Medicare hospital payments, creates enforcement and complaint procedures, renames OCR, sets up a Health Equity Commission, and funds hospital equity grants.
Requires health care providers who already report aggregate outcomes to HHS to report those outcomes disaggregated by race, national origin, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), disability, age, and other characteristics; creates a non‑identifiable data repository; adds equitable care measures to Medicare’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program beginning FY2026; renames and expands HHS’s Office for Civil Rights to include health equity; authorizes HHS to exclude providers who engage in a pattern of inequitable care (with an access exception); creates a Federal Health Equity Commission; establishes an administrative complaint and conciliation process for alleged inequitable care; and funds hospital grants to reduce disparities. Implements new reporting, enforcement, oversight, and grant programs aimed at identifying and reducing health disparities, while requiring HHS to account for social determinants of health and to avoid exclusions that would worsen access for underserved or low-income communities.