This is the Cato Daily podcast for Friday, March 14th, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Price, transparency, and health care sure would be nice,

but it's important to understand that clear prices for most services or treatments

are a consequence of a well-functioning market.

Cato's Michael Cannon explains.

Price transparency is something that you and I are accustomed to in most of our lives.

But health care is this exception.

I feel like it has been for at least my entire adult life.

And it's never been really clear to me why. Yeah, you go on Amazon. All the prices are right there.

And when you, but when you go to the doctor, when you go to the hospital, not only can you not get prices for the services that the doctor is recommending,

the doctor doesn't know the prices. And if you go to the billing department, the billing department

doesn't know the prices until you're running through insurance and you see what the negotiated

rate is. Now, part of the reason why prices are tricky in health care is because there's so much

uncertainty. You don't know when you walk in the doctor's office what you're going to need. And then

there are often multiple treatment options and there might be different decisions you have to make

based on the information you gather about how you're going to change a treatment option.

So you can't know what treatments you're going to get,

and you can't know what all the prices are going to be,

if you don't even know what the treatments are going to be.

So there's some inherent complexity there,

but it doesn't have to be as complex as it

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