You make some good points regarding quality, but there are a great many things where that doesn&#x27;t matter.  Yes if it&#x27;s a major medical issue where a life hangs in the balance quality matters tremendously.  But a huge range of medical care is about quality of life or other more minor things.<p>I also think that if prices were available to people they might choose the preventative care themselves versus waiting until things are so bad that a major and costly intervention is needed.<p>People talk about externalities as if they&#x27;re the devil when it comes to climate change, but when it comes to medicine nobody bats an eye.  Right now the consequences of people smoking, eating poorly, drinking too much, etc are generally externalities for individuals because either their insurance eats the cost or the public does.  I&#x27;m not suggesting that people should be forced to bear that cost entirely on their own without insurance, but with no pricing available GPs have one less tool to &quot;scare straight&quot; their patients.<p>I think what&#x27;s especially galling is that the hospitals do have all the pricing information available in a database that they use to turn patients charts into bills.  It&#x27;s just not published publicly so patients can&#x27;t make a slightly more informed decision on the front-end, they only see it AFTER care has been provided.