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Getting something for less is an economic fact of life — except when it comes to buying health care. We will eagerly shop for the best deal in town for a new car, a plasma TV or airline tickets, but when it comes to getting a routine checkup or a diagnostic procedure, we don’t think of comparing prices. And why would we? Just finding out what those prices are can be an insurmountable hurdle; many hospital bills are so incomprehensible they might as well be written in hieroglyphics.

Yet with health care costs reachin $2 trillion a year and gobbling up 17 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, we’ve got to do something to keep prices in check. And one way of doing that is to know exactly what we’re paying for. Price transparency can become a reality, though, only if consumers can become discriminating purchasers of health care services. That means that they need access to the necessary price and quality information and the financial resources to make an informed decision.

But getting to that point is not so simple. Employers, health care providers, vendors and insurers all have their own agendas. While the federal government backs price transparency in principle, it has been sending mixed signals about putting it into practice. So it has largely fallen to state governments to take the lead in supporting the shift from a top-down health care model in which patients are passive recipients to a health care consumerism model in which individuals make purchasing decisions based on firsthand knowledge of price, quality and service.

In this Deloitte Insights podcast, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, with Christina Dorfhuber and John Keith, both principals at Deloitte Consulting LLP, discuss why price transparency can have such a major impact on health care in this country and why we still have a long way to go before it’s a reality.

Related Content:
Whitepaper: A New Era of Transparency: What Does Health Care Really Cost?
Overview: The Quest for Quality Health Care
Overview: Center for Health Solutions
Services: Life Sciences and Health Care

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