<story><title>Trump Signs Executive Order Compelling Disclosure of Prices in Health Care</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-order-would-give-consumers-more-information-on-health-care-prices-11561384725?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptmcc</author><text>If one argues in favor of &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; solutions for healthcare, then one MUST argue in favor of pricing transparency. A functioning free market requires the open and honest sharing of price information for consumers to make informed choices.&lt;p&gt;Now, whether or not health care should operate under free market principles is a different discussion entirely. But the established powers seem to consistently fall back on the free market argument, but continue to keep pricing as opaque and complicated as possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dmix</author><text>The US has long ago abandoned free market healthcare. I don&amp;#x27;t know why people keep calling it that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s some bastard child of socialized medicine where the poor and old are covered mixed with gov mandated private insurance coming from a few very large insurance companies capable of operating within the regulatory environment.&lt;p&gt;Which is basically one step removed from full blown single-payer public health insurance (as we have here in Canada) and about a hundred steps removed from &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; health care.&lt;p&gt;I hope the US gov decides on single payer soon as I see no path towards going back to an actual market. Which would be better than the current system which features much of the worst of both worlds.</text></comment>
<story><title>Trump Signs Executive Order Compelling Disclosure of Prices in Health Care</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-order-would-give-consumers-more-information-on-health-care-prices-11561384725?mod=rsswn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptmcc</author><text>If one argues in favor of &amp;quot;free market&amp;quot; solutions for healthcare, then one MUST argue in favor of pricing transparency. A functioning free market requires the open and honest sharing of price information for consumers to make informed choices.&lt;p&gt;Now, whether or not health care should operate under free market principles is a different discussion entirely. But the established powers seem to consistently fall back on the free market argument, but continue to keep pricing as opaque and complicated as possible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SkyBelow</author><text>Competitors are tightly controlled, thus someone hiding their prices isn&amp;#x27;t easily supplanted by someone who is revealing them.  A free market solution would be to let anyone choose to hide their prices but to not protect their market share from more customer friendly competitors.&lt;p&gt;The existing system is nothing like a free market and anyone trying to justify keeping things the way they are with that reasoning is either being intentionally dishonest or is completely naive about the situation.</text></comment>