> It's certainly the case around here that doctors are moving under the hospital umbrella. That's part of a trend that's a few decades old, and which has accel

> It's certainly the case around here that doctors are moving under the hospital umbrella. That's part of a trend that's a few decades old, and which has accelerated in the last 5-10 years. It's not a function of the number of physicians; physicians are selling their practices to hospitals because they can no longer sustain themselves in private practice. > I don't think the hospitals are forced to keep their prices obscure though (see Massachusetts or Oklahoma), it just happens to be the best way for them to make revenue because if people could easily shop prices, they would. If anything, hospitals would prefer to be able to compete this way directly. They can't, though, because there is no single 'price', even if you're talking about a discrete, routine procedure that has no risk for complications. The way medical billing works, they don't necessarily have a set price for a given service per carrier. And even if they do, that doesn't always correlate to what the patient ends up paying (which is, of course, the thing the patient actually cares about). The reason they don't have a set price - even internally - isn't because they don't want to. It's because the contracts with public and private insurers have resulted in the amount of money they need to charge for a service being a function of so many external factors that they literally can't. Chapter 224 is a perfect example of a feel-good law that doesn't actually do anything in practice, because it fails to address the underlying complexity that's the root of the current problem with price transparency.