Lifting The Veil: Do Health Care Price Transparency Laws Actually Lower Costs?

The purpose of this research is to determine whether or not health care transparency laws, in the form of price transparency, lower the rate of increase paid out in health care expenditures in those states that have enacted these laws compared to those states that have not. By controlling for factors such as poverty, age, chronic illnesses, and income that may play a part in lowering or raising health care costs, the primary explanatory variable – health care price transparency laws – can determine if there is a strong relationship with the dependent variable (the rate of increase on health care expenditures paid out in each state per person from 2000 to 2014) by using the Multiple Linear Regression of analysis. Implications of this research includes possible policy initiatives by those states that do not require healthcare data transparency. For this research, policy outcome and effectiveness are far more important than policy creation. One of the primary reasons for why the State of Massachusetts created policy in this domain was in order to mandate, “An Act Improving the Quality of Health Care and Reducing Costs through Increased Transparency, Efficiency and Innovation.” (ncsl, 2019). The value of this research is that the more we focus on how individual states manage costs, the more equipped state legislators dealing with the high cost of health care can attain knowledge about their options. Another benefit that flows solely from states that require costs be accessible to the general public will, itself, become a catalyst for lower costs. While this benefits the consumer, it also benefits those health care professionals who are tasked with cost oversight as they will also benefit from research that digs deeper into how transparency offers them another tool to combat an industry that has a reputation for hidden costs