I'm in the healthcare industry, so I try my best to pay attention to it through news and blogs and such, though I don't claim to be an expert in the field. My

I'm in the healthcare industry, so I try my best to pay attention to it through news and blogs and such, though I don't claim to be an expert in the field. My impression is that price transparency is the least of the healthcare industry's problems. On aggregate, Medicare pays out about 25% of what the hospital or physician asks for, and private insurances apparently about 50%. The pricing for the uninsured is the initial price that hospitals/physicians set to get the maximum they can out of different insurance companies, and are not meant to be the charge for uninsured patients. There's been studies talking about how price transparency doesn't change physician behavior in hospitals that tried it out. Some patients report trying to compare prices for procedures across physicians and hospitals, but didn't get the quality of treatment due to picking the cheapest one. Instead, the #1 concern you hear about all the time is EHR (electronic health records). It's the #1 reason physicians give for feeling burned out, according to some surveys. The popular opinion on electronic healthcare records seem to be that they're glorified cash registers for keeping track of claims data to bill insurance, but doesn't contain much clinically relevant data - for example, I hear physicians complaining online about how they can find when a patient went to an ER and through what means, but they have trouble finding what clinical reasons the patient went to the ER for. Granted, apparently a few percentage of physicians think that their EHR contain clinically relevant data, but most EHR systems that people are using right now aren't that sophisticated, usually due to cost and to the stupid time it would take to update to the new system and train people to use it properly. Word is that it takes years for a practitioner to learn how to use the EHR system (EPIC, Cerner, etc.). Different hospitals use different systems, which makes interoperability impossible, since there aren't good standards for recording EHRs, or they're over-complicated, or something according to people who develop EHRs. I also hear hospital C-level people talking about how expensive EHR systems are - one hospital reported upgrading to a new one cost about half a billion dollars, which was a third of their net patient revenue. Independent physicians are opting for direct primary care models (where you directly pay the physician some monthly fee, circumventing insurance) or to be employed by larger hospitals or physician groups, because the federal government requires that you try to implement some level of EHR, which is too expensive for independent physicians that can't afford hiring IT people on top of everyone else. Some surverys say that physicians spend half their time on looking at / putting data into EHRs, which can be twice as much time as they spend on seeing patients face-to-face. Health insurance billing being extremely complicated doesn't help, either. You have to learn CPT/ICD-9/ICD-10 codes to bill correctly and get reimbursed, and it's so complicated that apparently some people get paid ~$40,000 a year just to convert diagnoses/procedures to CPT/ICD-9/ICD-10 codes. Hospitals/physicians end up needing to pay for those jobs as well, on top of IT people for maitaining/upgrading EHRs. In fact, there's a lot of consultation groups out there that advise you on how to bill insurance / submit required documents for Medicare / set up EHR. There's a lot of other administrative overhead costs that contribute to healthcare costs seems to need higher priority, to me.