[semerda]

"but with most patients not being responsible for paying" -- right there lays the answer and the problem. I thought about this a lot while doing my 1st healthcare startup in silicon valley and connected with many startups "disrupting healthcare through price transparency". 5 years later... None succeeded.

If one could incentivize every patient to upload their bills to an open source service that would crunch the data and spit it out anonymously online showcasing hospitals & services rendered + insurers et al.. then I think we might be on our way to true price transparency and a potential disruption in US healthcare.

[ericd]

I spent some time thinking about ways to incentivize patients to upload bills, you'd only need a very small fraction to get a representative sample of how much different services cost at different hospitals. I haven't come up with anything very motivating, except maybe the desire to expose how ridiculous some of them are.