Gingrich & DeSantis: How Congress can give Americans an extra $11,000 without costing taxpayers a penny

Meanwhile, analysis by Larry Van Horn at Vanderbilt University has shown that cash-paying patients pay prices that are an average of 40 percent lower than health plans for the same health care services.

A 40 percent reduction in the prices paid for health care services would represent a savings of $11,000 per year, per family.

The main reason cash-paying patients pay 40 percent less is because they take the time to shop around for the best value for their health dollar.

This is the major reason why health care prices – and therefore, health care premiums – keep going up much faster than the rate of inflation year after year.

There is little reason for most health care providers to offer competitive prices because patients do not consider price when making decisions.

The Trump administration has taken a bold step to fix the broken health care marketplace with a new rule requiring hospitals to make all their prices public, including negotiated prices with health plans and self-pay, cash prices.  This public posting must be in a machine-readable format to allow for third party apps to aggregate the data to allow for easy shopping for patients.

Giving them access to prices in advance of care will supply much needed financial security and give them more confidence to seek out care, since they will know in advance what it will cost.

This is because even though they are renting the insurance companies’ networks, the negotiated prices are still invisible to them in advance of care.

With full price transparency, however, employers will be able to easily see which health care providers in their areas are the best value.

Once more patients start choosing better values, the increased competition will force the highest priced providers to lower their prices to be competitive.

Now more than ever, America needs the economic boost and financial security that price transparency in health care will provide!