Transparency in healthcare

I read a paper talking about how Healthcare is expensive and a possible way to decrease spending. The paper suggested health care providers should increase the availability of their price information to their customers then people can look and choose the cheaper providers. Health care spending makes up 18 percent of the US economy, and keeps growing. One of the things that makes this field so unique is the fact that consumers don’t usually know much about the pricing. If health care providers were to become more transparent with their costs then people would be able to switch to providers who provided cheaper care. This paper discussed the potential ups and downs of providing more open information within this market.
This interested me because health care is currently a foreign concept to me, but as I get older, I will need to worry about these things. I think that beginning to gain an understanding of the subject would be a good idea. In this paper the author talks about a potential idea to decrease health care spending in the United States. The author talks about having companies increase transparency with their pricing, allowing consumers to search for the best options. Searching for the right health care provider reduces prices by around 10-17 percent, however the ability to search, is not provided. As the author states, “Health insurance reduces consumers’ exposure to price differences and thereby reduces their incentives to search.” (Lieber 155).

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