“I can’t imagine how I would go about making this useful,” Ms. Stovall said on Sunday. “I wouldn’t know how to find my procedure. I wouldn’t know what services might be rolled up with my procedure. And I would not know the price to me after health insurance.”

By most accounts, the Trump administration is pursuing a worthy goal, but the execution of its plans leaves much to be desired.

After the administration proposed the price-disclosure requirement in April 2018, many hospitals warned of the shortcomings that are now evident.

But federal health officials, accustomed to debating issues inside the Washington policy bubble, have still been surprised at the reaction around the country as consumers and local news media try to decipher the data. The administration says it is open to suggestions for 2020 and beyond.

The price-disclosure requirement, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, grows out of one sentence in the Affordable Care Act, which says, “Each hospital operating within the United States shall for each year establish (and update) and make public (in accordance with guidelines developed by the secretary) a list of the hospital’s standard charges for items and services provided by the hospital.”

The idea languished for eight years. Under prior guidance from the government, hospitals could meet their obligations by providing charges to patients on request. But the Trump administration wanted to go further.

“We’ve updated our guidelines to specifically require hospitals to post price information on the internet in a machine-readable format,” Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said last week. “This is a historic change from what’s been required in the past.”