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I'm curious as to why you think it would ever be in the best interests of the medical industry to provide price transparency.
Like, obviously they could develop ways to formalize price estimates and communicate them to customers. If anything, that's confirmed by the poor quality of the countervailing arguments in the thread below. But why would they ever want to?
Having the ability to inflate prices without reducing demand, because nobody at the point of consumption has any idea what anything costs, seems like a pretty sweet situation. Likewise, high salaries and various other forms of grift and waste across healthcare are made possible by the broader cultural perception that the industry provides priceless, sanctified Human Care Through Science rather than some mere grubby service like your hairdresser or auto mechanic. Giving patients the power to participate in rational cost-benefit analysis about their healthcare seems like it'd work out worse for every single level of the industry.
Total price opacity almost certainly is a benefit to the medical industry currently. As you mention, from the rest of the conversation, it's pretty clear that they have chosen this path, and it's likely because they think that it is in their own financial interest. I am extremely sympathetic to game theory arguments, and it is completely legitimate to ask why they would ever willingly give up their grip on the market.
The first, most obvious answer, is that it is the right thing to do. Doctors claim to hold themselves to high standards when it comes to informed consent. They are clearly failing miserably on that score when it comes to informing their patients about the financial parts of the costs and benefits.
Of course, one can easily observe that those sorts of considerations often get ground into dust upon first contact with the raw ability of a cartel to enrich themselves. So, a second possible reason would be if enough cultural argumentation is built up to force the conversation about informed consent and prices at a high enough level. Embarrass them, as they talk in circles. They will have to weigh the monetary gain against the loss in status as more and more people realize that they're lying and violating their stated principles in order to enrich themselves.
A third possible reason could be lawsuits to change the regulatory landscape. I've seen some lawsuits going on against hospitals who are using their boilerplate "consent to treat" forms that they use at intake to justify absolutely every charge that they choose to make, regardless of whether the patient actually agreed to that particular thing. We'll see if they go anywhere.
I described some additional possibilities here. One of the most likely possibilities is just that they are forced to change via regulation. This is not preferred, as the regulatory process is often a total mess, and it's not super likely that it will result in a truly coherent way of doing things, but when there is this much pent-up outrage at how things are currently done, it is entirely plausible that the government will just drop a bomb on them and force them to make some set of changes, regardless of whether it's in their interest, or whether those changes even make much sense.
As I argue in the linked comment, I personally think that the probabilities are trending in a way such that if they don't clean up their act, something is going to happen that is going to blow up the whole thing, with potentially highly unpredictable results. I mentioned similarly seeing the writing on the wall for the real estate and IoT industries. From a pure self-interest point of view, they have to weigh the value they would lose by voluntarily cleaning up their act in smaller ways now (in an attempt to reduce the probability of a regulatory bomb or something like that being dropped) against the expected value they'd get from a period of sticking with their guns until a bomb gets dropped plus whatever mess they get after.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but most of the industry-facing benefits of price opacity seem to entail a parallel set of benefits for regulators, legislators and nonprofits. If the meme that Healthcare is Priceless signs blank checks for producers in the industry, it presumably works the same way for bureaucrats and lawmakers, who get a free pass to accumulate power, expand surveillance, reward cronies and promote pet causes through selective disbursement of all that funding. And that's leaving out the large proportion of regulators/ lawmakers who are just literally in bed with parts of the industry, like the FDA folks who retire to take plum positions with Pharma.
I'm sure you could get that class to happily support selected instances of price-limiting legislation where it might hurt their political adversaries, but who's the constituency for plain consumer empowerment, beyond just Joe Q. Public?
Possibly so. I don't know what mess we're gonna get, but in the linked comment, I read the tea leaves that might be pointing toward at least something happening, even if it's a mess and not terribly coherent:
Public outrage can quickly boil to the point that "something must be done". Once it gets there, Sagan only knows what mess of a "something" we're going to get. Maybe the medical industry can consider banking on their regulatory capture enough that they can shape the output to at least not hurt them too much, or even to benefit them. But again, looking at how it's gone in other industries, I don't know that I'd count on it. I doubt it would be pure pro-consumer, but there's a good chance we'll get some mess of "something", which they might not super like. I bet the IoT industry wishes now that they had figured out a way to eliminate default passwords from the industry before, for example.
I sure hope you're right. But does there exist a historical precedent for any industry ever moving from "heavily bureaucratized, intensively regulated, ideologically freighted, opaque, inefficient and expensive" toward "lean, simple, transparent and consumer-oriented" in any meaningful way under a modern state? If so, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
Hold your horses. I'm hoping for incremental change. I ain't nearly that hopeful, either. More likely, we'll get some bomb of other confused regulation, which might have some incidental pro-consumer stuff.
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