Health care is a unique consumer market. Unlike other sectors of the economy, few people are ever inclined to shop around for the best deal, instead following the advice of their doctor and using the hospital where their doctor practices.

Even if you did want to find the provider with the best prices, good luck trying to find that information. Hospital pricing isn’t designed with the best interests of patients in mind. It’s intentionally opaque and primarily designed to squeeze as much as possible out of patients and public coffers alike, prioritizing profit over patient care. Hospitals have a practically infinite number of possible prices for the same procedure, fueled by personal data collection and corporate greed from insurers looking to get as big a piece of the pie as possible. This elaborate system of price manipulation explains why the United States spends far more on health care than the typical OECD country, while maintaining stark disparities in access to care.

For our June 2024 print issue, Robert Kuttner sheds light on our exploitative system of hospital pricing, impenetrable to patients and regulators alike. You can read the full story here.

Tomorrow on the Prospect Weekly Roundup, our live weekly YouTube show, I’ll be talking with The Capital Forum’s Antitrust Correspondent and former Prospect fellow Jarod Facundo about his piece on grocery pricing for our June 2024 special issue, and how all the pricing strategies we've reported on over the past two weeks—junk fees, price fixing, shrinkflation, personalization and data collection—come together at the grocery store.

We hope you’ll join us for what will be a great conversation! We’ll be going live tomorrow at 12:30 ET. Click here to watch the livestream when it starts.

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