Price Transparency

The Trump administration released a far-reaching plan to force hospitals and insurers to disclose their secret negotiated rates:

“ Em­ploy­ers and pa­tients are of­ten un­able to see which hos­pi­tal sys­tems and doc­tor’s of­fices are dri­ving prices up­ward. Some health-care econ­o­mists ar­gue that the se­crecy is a fac­tor in why the U.S. spends more per res­i­dent on health care than any other de­vel­oped na­tion.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion’s vi­sion is to arm pa­tients with in­for­ma­tion needed to make health-care de­ci­sions much like shop­ping for other con­sumer ser­vices. Rates po­ten­tially could be posted on pub­lic web­sites, where con­sumers would check the ne­go­ti­ated price of a ser­vice be­fore they pick a provider.“