Price Transparency and Patient Empowerment

Health care price transparency tools have proliferated across the United States in recent years. While these tools are primarily intended to help control rising healthcare costs, they are also frequently described as empowering patients by providing the financial information needed to make more fully informed decisions about medical care. If these tools do empower patients, then the money and time invested in developing and maintaining them could plausibly be justified even if price transparency proves largely ineffective at cost-containment. Using Nancy Kass's public health ethics framework, I explore whether price transparency can rightly be seen as achieving the aim of empowering patients. In examining this issue, I distinguish between what I call passive price transparency initiatives (where the information is made available for patients to find, should they choose to look for it) from active price transparency initiatives (where information about costs is given directly to patients). Most existing price transparency initiatives are passive, and I argue that these programs, rather than empowering patients, instead risk increasing patient burdens in a way that is most significant for those who are already worse off. Only active price transparency (in other words, price disclosure) can be seen as empowering patients in a fair and not overly burdensome way.