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If Patients Don’t Use Available Health Service Pricing Information, Is Transparency Still Important?

Year: 2022

Type: article

Abstract: The US health system is replete with health service pricing idiosyncrasies and opacity unrelated to quality. Online tools intended to make health care purchasing resemble consumerism by making prices transparent have had little if any effect on improving health care market functioning and changing patient behavior. Although price transparency is still in its infancy, it holds promise to be as useful to patient-consumers as it has been to large purchasers (eg, employers) of health services and policymakers. But even if price information is not routinely used by patients, transparency of such information still has ethical importance in a market in which patients pay increasingly high out-of-pocket costs.

Source: The AMA Journal of Ethic

DOI: 10.1001/amajethics.2022.1056

Authors: Christopher Whaley, Austin Frakt

Institutions: RAND Corporation, RAND School of Public Policy, Boston University, VA Boston Healthcare System

Language: English

Topic: Healthcare Policy and Management

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging

Award: G306224080