Won't fix anything. The itemized list is meaningless to the guy paying since its pre-negociated with insurance anyway and if you're in a hospital you're not exactly in a position to say "yeah I'll go next door to solve my heart attack". Might work for a doctor's office though. This is just placating. We need wholesale healthcare reform and it has to happen in the ripping the bandaid off sense. Unfortunately, it's an issue no one will cross the aisle on. Probably because not a single congresscritter is on the same insurance their constituents are. A good way to placate and actually solve something is to open up a national healthcare option to people in order to remove the early 20th century idea of healthcare being an employer benefit. We can work from there. Want private insurance? Buy it on a marketplace. Can't afford, or don't want private insurance? The country will provide you something for free at the cost of modestly increased taxes. It blows my mind healthcare isn't a constitutional guarantee considering a strong, healthy society creates a strong, healthy country. Again, the only assholes who can change that have the best healthcare in the country, paid by us, while we are left with the garbage given to us by employers.
We needed real and meaningful reform decades ago. The insurance industry is so bloated and abusive to to consumer/employers/medical industry that it is truly embarrassing for the nation. Ripping off Americans on medical expenses has gotten so out of control that it is laugh out loud ridiculous. Personal anecdote, coworker needed an MRI because some kind of head pain. (He has the trash employer health care plan). The policy only paid like 600 bucks towards the cost of the procedure. A single MRI amounted to a bill of roughly $5000 which he is now on the hook for. It is shameful for the United States. Really, this is a racket. Gov, big pharma, insurance lobby, just sad. It really is obscene that rent seeking and greed of all involved allowed it to come to this.
Medicare-for-All "Socialism" Is Just Another Racket http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/11/medicare-for-all-socialism-is-just.html
Well expressed! The Blues were sued , lost every case, by some States, a few decades back, because they negotiated lower prices but based co-pays on the official, non-negotiated price; thus effectively screwing their policy holders. Of course they did not tell the policy holders the actual price paid, but instead misled policy holders into thinking the insurer paid the billed price less the copay. This may stlll be going on! Example: you get billed for a colonoscopy at $3200. The insurance company calculates your co-pay as 20% of 3200 or $640. The insurance company actually pays $1200 to the hospital and physician, i.e., the negotiated price of $1500 less $300 patient co-pay, but doesn't tell you this. You should have had a co-pay of $300 not $640! In U.S. Style Capitalism, there exists nothing more corrupt than American Medicine. The corruption is endemic through the entire system! Why? Because we insist on treating medical care as though it were a "free market." That it can never be! In most instances, although the seller may walk, the buyer can't. And in many instances, due to regulation, neither the buyer nor seller can walk! This has created a nightmare of regulatory capture that has spawned a government protected Cartel. Nothing, nothing whatsoever, could be worse, except no access to care at all. And that is why the Cartel survives, there is something actually worse!!!
It's a small step. At least with price disclosure, insurance companies can compete for a race to the bottom to steal clients from higher priced options. That is until the conglomerates align to do price fixing.
A for-profit health care system cannot, and will not, ever work "for the people". The MRI machine has been paid off long long ago, but the hospitals do not tell the insurance companies this, so now the hospital bigwigs are raking in GOBS of money by continuing to cook their books on "depreciation" of the equipment and all that BS. I am telling you, Ben Kingsley's character "Cosmo" had it right many years ago.