Forbes January 4, 2021
The New Year is starting off with a healthcare victory for American patients.
On January 1, a new rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services went into effect requiring hospitals to publish the prices they negotiate with insurers for various medical procedures. Previously, those prices had been secret.
This rule will inject some sorely needed transparency into the U.S. healthcare system—and thereby result in lower costs and better quality care for consumers.
Prices are crucial to the functioning of markets, including the healthcare market. Rising prices are signals for producers to increase supply, or for consumers to moderate their consumption. Declining prices do just the opposite.
In much of the healthcare system, neither producers nor consumers have any...
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