Fix the principal/agent problem by decoupling health insurance from employment by not having health insurance be paid for with pre-tax dollars.

For hospitals (where the majority of US healthcare spending occurs), pricing transparency has been the rule for more than 5 years:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-pric...

Yeah I'd like to see this before universal healthcare. I think we can do better than universal healthcare if we start with transparency on pricing to kill graft.

Just had a kid, navigation all the procedure codes and everything was insane. I just wanted to figure out what they were charging us for. I just gave up b/c we thankfully hit out out of pocket max for this year.

Won't matter unless service providers are forced to have one single rate for all payers. Which we can't even manage at grocery stores.

>Legislate transparent pricing for all medications and procedures first.

This is an impossible ask. Truly impossible. The medical care providers have spent the last 50 years or more honing the art of making costs inscrutable. Not really to make it harder for you or I to know the costs, but for the insurance companies to know the cost. 50 years is a long time, that's not just one set of workers who have done this, it's 4-6 career spans now... the first to learn it taught it to their underlings and coworkers, who invented new sophisticated techniques and bureaucracies and taught that to the third career generation, who did the same and so on.

Even if we had universal healthcare, you're not getting rid of that. It's now a culture. A transmissible, everlasting culture.

For any political ask you might come up with, absurd and difficult and even intractable as it might be, this is light years beyond that. God himself couldn't make these prices transparent.

> Force hospitals to expose API's with transparent pricing.

Unless you're uninsured (which is a whole separate clusterfuck), the hospitals aren't the ones who decide how much you pay for any service - the insurance companies are. The sticker price that hospitals charge is almost meaningless and is intentionally high because it's used as the starting point for negotiations, which always bring the price down (never up). There isn't any expectation that any insurer is actually going to pay the billed amount as-is.

Also legislate transparent negotiated pricing for medications and procedures for each insurance plan, as well as rejection rates for medications and procedures.

Oh yes, and patient/coverage drop rates