The slow march towards health care transparency
October 11, 2014
Massachusetts state law now requires insurers to offer pricing information to their members (Kaiser Health News article). This is a tremendous leap towards pricing transparency for a single state. Hopefully, other states will follow. Unfortunately, this information is not public in that at least some insurers require users to log in with their account in order to see pricing information (and so I can't comment on how well implemented the systems are). Nevertheless, this must be far more useful than previously available information in helping people decide where to go for a certain procedure.
It's ironic that it took state law to coerce insurance companies into doing something that is likely going to benefit both consumers and insurers.