Progressive Media Resources Group

its a struggle between big hospital corps and big insurance over how much to charge and how much they are willing to pay for it. That's why prices can vary quite dramatically across different providers even in the same city. Smaller insurers or providers don't really have much bargaining power.

Making pricing more transparent is an attempt to bring more fairness to pricing. Patients might like to know how much a procedure will cost before getting shocked by an artificially inflated bill, that needs to be negotiated down to something more reasonable.

I support single payer as much as anyone, but the big payers like medicare/medicaid and insurers are really the only check on health care costs we have. An individual patient doesn't stand a chance on his/her own.