It may ultimately be impossible for American healthcare consumers to reduce their costs because the prevailing patient care delivery model is designed to “extract resources” from them, industry watchers asserted at a recent panel hosted by the Alliance for Health Policy.

“This system is set up to obfuscate,” said Glenn Rodriguez, M.D., board chair of CareOregon and a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. “It’s designed to make it impossible for people to make informed choices.”

Without price transparency, patients lack the information they need to make value-based decisions about their care providers and utilization. They also lack negotiating power.

Providers suffer, too, from unreasonable administrative burdens. Hospitals, health systems and private practices annually spend approximately $39 billion — and a lot of precious clinic time — keeping up with regulatory requirements, noted Joanna Hiatt Kim, vice president of payment policy for the American Hospital Association.

“We pull clinicians away from patients and put them on paperwork,” she said.

Will American healthcare take action to right its own ship?

Get the full story and analysis here, from Fierce Healthcare‘s Paige Minemyer.