One study shows access to pricing transparency tools did not result in lower costs

I'm a big fan of healthcare transparency. When patients have better knowledge about both cost and quality and can make better decisions about their medical care, the marketplace for healthcare services can function more like a... marketplace. It was surprising to me to read how one study found that widespread access to pricing information actually led to a slight increase in spending compared to a control group.

I've only read the abstract, but one detail that jumps out is that only 10% of the employees who had access to the pricing information tools actually used it in the first year of access. That raises questions as to whether or not the rest of the employees were sufficiently notified about the tools and whether they had reason to care (in the form of deductibles and co-insurance). Another interesting detail was that the average spending for the employees who had access started out slightly higher than those who did not. I'm not sure if that's a meaningful detail, but it does raise the question of whether the two companies that offered access had been seeing larger increases in prior years or not. Either way, it would be interesting to see a similar study between a high-engagement group (where people were actually using the tool) and a control group.