Minnesota’s Senate and House are both considering bills (SF 3480 and HF 3893, respectively) that would require healthcare providers disclose their pricing for standard procedures, services and products. The bills come at a time when consumer and healthcare reform advocates alike are calling for major reforms of US hospitals’ and healthcare systems’ business practices.

The lack of price transparency and the subsequent inelasticity of demand that it creates have long been cited as barriers both to reducing healthcare costs and to improving patient outcomes.

“How can we have the often-touted patient-centered, patient-controlled, patient-driven health care system without patients knowing prices upfront?,” retired family physician Carl E. Burkland wrote in support of the measures in the Star Tribune. “The health care industry’s ability to maintain high prices in the United States is based on two marketplace realities: protection from competition and negotiating power.”

“Consumers cannot lower their health care costs because they do not have market power,” he emphasized. “Price information is market power.”

Read Burkland’s full op-ed here, in the Star Tribune.