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I've long assumed that either the insurance companies or the care providers (or both!) want to keep the list prices hidden. I assume for competitive reasons. I thought the first Trump administration passed rules requiring those to be published, but that doesn't seem to have done much in practice (published, behind a door marked "beware of the leopard"?).
My personal suggestion is that we should, as a condition of accepting Medicare patients/payments, require providers to charge no more than a multiple of the Medicare price list, even if that multiple is something like 2 or 3.
functionally speaking this is the current status quo - commercial prices are generally somewhere around 1.5-2.5 of the Medicare price for a given service.
The hospital transparency stuff is hidden behind massive massive JSON files and poor data quality. Numerous startups are working in the space to make it actually transparent - still a work in progress.
The insurers themselves are doing some of the work by using eg variable copays to drive utilization to cheaper contracted hospitals. Only works in urban cores though.
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Hospitals all post their list prices these days, but unfortunately those are the list price and literally everyone gets a discount of some sort.
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