Rising Health Care Costs: Is Price Transparency the Answer?

Health care spending is a key focus for U.S. policy makers as high and increasing health costs can impede access to care and impose undue financial burdens on patients. One potential solution is to lower health care prices, which are typically higher in the U.S. than in other countries and are highly variable both within and across areas. Revealing prices paid through price transparency initiatives, particularly in combination with insurance designs that expose consumers to higher costs, has been promoted as a way to lower prices. Betsy Cliff will present the results of a recent study of the effects of all-payer claims databases on hospital prices.