At a June 18, 2013 Senate Finance Committee hearing, leading health care experts and U.S. Senators explored the high and variable cost of health care in America, as part of a special Senate Committee on Finance hearing on health care transparency. During the hearing "High Prices, Low Transparency: The Bitter Pill of Health Care Costs," Castlight Health co-founder and CEO, Giovanni Colella, M.D., Suzanne Delbanco, Ph.D; and Paul B. Ginsburg, Ph.D. debated policy solutions for improving transparency into the cost and quality of health care. The witness panel for the hearing also included Steven Brill, JD, the author of the March 2013 TIME magazine article, "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us," which highlighted several examples of high costs and inefficient use of resources among health care providers. In the article Brill (founder of CourtTV) detailed the internal "chargemaster" lists that hospitals use as a baseline to set the price of their services.
"By any definition, this is no one's idea of a functioning market place," Brill said in testimony (see below). "In a functioning marketplace prices are based on something that is explainable - whether it's the cost of producing the product, the laws of supply and demand, or the quality of the product. In this marketplace, no one can explain a hospital's charge of $77 for a box of gauze pads, or $18 for a diabetes test strip that can be bought on Amazon for about 50 cents."
"Obamacare does nothing about these prices, nothing to solve this problem. Zero," he said. "My theory is if you don't mess with the profits of the key players in the industry, you get to get your bill through Congress."
No senator at the hearing disputed the need for more transparency on medical expenses. "The chargemaster is like the sticker price of a new car--it's inflated," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT). "But unlike new cars, some people have no choice but to pay the chargemaster price."