Insurers and employers have been required to publish their negotiated rates for hospital and physician services every month for more than four years under what is known as the Transparency in Coverage regulation. But those data files have been filled with unusable data known as “ghost rates” or “zombie rates” — prices for services that would never happen, like if a dermatologist were to perform an open-heart surgery. Some research has suggested more than 90% of the prices are ghost rates.

Trump officials said insurers and their vendors have been purposefully gumming up the datasets with these numbers to make it more difficult for the public to understand what the true, relevant prices are, and they are attempting to put a stop to it.

“The evasive action was just to flood the zone with so much information that instead of enlightening the process, it actually obscured it further,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at an event Monday. “The information was impossible to decipher, and even the employers who have hundreds of attorneys working for them could not figure out the differentiation in prices.”