Three major insurers agree to share prices

Health Care Cost Institute announced that they will be working with three major insurance companies to make health care prices available to consumers, starting in 2015. On the face of it, this announcement has tremendous importance for the health care transparency movement, and would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. If this portal actually comes to pass, it would be a very exciting moment. We need to wait to see, however, how much information is actually disclosed, and whether the portal will end up as useful as we might imagine.

The move seems to make a lot of sense for the insurers. By arming their members with additional cost and quality information, members can make better decisions, hopefully saving both the members and insurers more money in the process. To take things a step further, insurers could make this information freely available in a standardized format so that smaller scale innovators can build on top of this data, potentially in more engaging ways.