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Well, of course it didn't fix all of the problems with pricing in the industry. The industry has amazing lobbyists. All they could do is fix the one very very narrow problem of insurance companies banning doctors from telling patients they could get their meds cheaper without using insurance. Similarly with the anti-kickbacks. The laundry list of exceptions is phenomenal, and it's questionable whether they even conceptualized the problem correctly in the first place.
I'm generally skeptical of regulation. It's usually ineffectual, produces unintended outcomes, and gets ground up by lobbying efforts to protect entrenched interests. It would be my last resort as a tool to improve price transparency in medical services. However, at this point, I'm pretty much out of other ideas for how to accomplish it. If you have any, I'm all ears. Absent that, I am at the point where I would support as minimally-scoped of a regulation as is possible to say some version of, "You just have to give them a good faith price estimate for services that you're planning to do before you do them (subject to the caveat of situations where informed consent is otherwise infeasible)."
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