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> we also have a lack of price transparency Transparency is only half the battle. Setting prices to something reasonable is the other half.

• AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  That is one of the major ways prices get to something reasonable. Once you have people taking cost into consideration when choosing a provider, it becomes a competitive advantage to have a lower price in a way that it hasn't previously. Obviously you have to execute this well and without the rules getting corrupted by inefficient businesses that want to keep their margins, but "rules are not corrupt" is the sine qua non of reducing prices regardless of which specific mechanism you use. One way to fix that central problem is to decentralize it. Eliminate the federal rules to be replaced with state and local rules. Then you may get one city or state screwing things up, but it at least puts the upper limit on how expensive things can get there at the cost of traveling to a different place with different rules and lower costs, and the travel cost is naturally lower between cities or states than between countries. (And having the option to do that generally prevents you from having to actually do it, because the local providers still want your business more than they want the higher margins.)