Why health care transparency is complicated and how it can be fixed
President Trump’s administration recently announced new guidelinesrequiring hospitals and insurers to give consumers more information about their health care prices. The administration decreed this transparency mandate as an unprecedented and revolutionary change to the American health care system. However, price transparency alone will not produce any groundbreaking change in our health care system. Policymakers should, in parallel, focus on improving the transparency of the quality of care patients receive. Consumers need to know not only the price of the service they are about to receive, but also the quality of it.