Back in June of this year, President Trump made an argument behind his executive order that by having transparency in medical bills, patients would have more information regarding their health care coverage and lower prices of many insurance companies.
It all seems like a good idea as "recent work by the Health Care Cost Institute, a group that pools and analyzes insurance claims, found that the highest price for a simple blood test could be 40 times the lowest price for the same test in a given market". These wide ranges of prices could be lowered if transparency was in place as patients look for a different insurance company to aid them.
But from a study conducted in the 1990s in Denmark regarding Concrete prices instill fear in many people that are against the idea of having prices become transparent and open to the public. The Danish Study shows that prices rose from 15% to 20% once they disclosed their prices with customers and this was mostly caused by the fact that there were very few competitors in that specific market which made collusion possible.
Collusion is made illegal for many obvious reasons but once transparency in prices are readily available to the public, many fear that something like the Concrete study would reoccur. Granted that market systems in manufacturers of concrete and health care have huge differences, but due to "its longstanding secrecy around negotiated health care prices," there is too little of a research done to really know the effects transparency will have to the American health care.
Sources: Why Transparency on Medical Prices Could Actually Make Them Go Higher
This is very interesting. The concrete industry you mentioned is an oligopoly, and America's pharmaceutical industry can be considered an oligopoly too. I think the one key difference is that there are two main models in the pharmaceutical market. For patented, brand name drugs, there is no competition so pharmaceutical companies can charge however much they want (monopoly). For generic drugs which are all essentially the same, companies could collude to increase drug prices (oligopoly). However, if stricter price controls are put in place, the large companies would lose much of their pricing power.
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