New publication traces roots of healthcare pricing opacity and explains why transparency depends on transforming disclosure into decision-ready intelligence.
WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, February 4, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Simple Healthcare today announced the release of a new white paper, History of Price Transparency in U.S. Healthcare: How Healthcare Became a Market Without Visible Prices, which examines how the U.S. healthcare system evolved into one of the largest and only economic sectors without pricing visibility. The paper also explores how recent federal price transparency mandates, while revolutionary in practice, require meaningful transformation before data can become decision ready.
The paper traces the historical evolution of healthcare payment in the U.S., including the shift from direct-pay to managed care, employer sponsored insurance, and value-based reimbursement. It also explores how layers of financing, contracting, and regulation separated the delivery of care from clear pricing, leaving patients, employers, and purchasers to make decisions without clear information on prices.
“With the release of price transparency data, U.S. healthcare has crossed a one-way threshold in which prices are no longer entirely hidden,” said David Muhlestein, CEO of Simple Healthcare. “But disclosure alone does not create accountability or better decisions. The real challenge now is converting complex, inconsistent, large data files into reliable pricing intelligence that stakeholders can actually use.”
While millions of negotiated rates are now publicly available through the Hospital Price Transparency (HPT) and Transparency in Coverage (TiC) Rules, the paper highlights persistent barriers to usability, including inconsistent formatting, data quality issues, missing context, and extreme file complexity. As a result, while pricing data may be publicly available, it is not easily interpretable, which limits its value.
The paper argues that the next phase of price transparency will be defined by the industry’s ability to transform the data into clean, normalized, validated, and contextualized information that can support real-world decision making. When the data reaches this phase, it holds great promise for improving consumer decision making, strengthening employer purchasing, improving provider and payer negotiations, informing regulatory oversight, and introducing prices as meaningful economic signals in healthcare.
History of Price Transparency in U.S. Healthcare: How Healthcare Became a Market Without Visible Prices is intended for healthcare leaders, employers, policymakers, investors, consultants, and researchers seeking a clearer understanding of both the promise and the limitations of today’s transparency era, and what must change for transparency to deliver lasting impact.
The full paper is available at: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687bd1da8a52d05033fdf6ed/69794a08f1b8f62cfca9ceee_History%20of%20PT%20Paper.pdf
About Simple Healthcare
Simple Healthcare is a research-driven data company dedicated to making healthcare pricing clear, accurate, and decision-grade. We transform decision-making by turning complex transparency files into validated datasets—filtering out duplicates, ghost rates, and other noise while enriching with comprehensive provider data—and pairing them with intuitive analytics tools and APIs for fast benchmarking, contract analysis, and market monitoring. Led by experts in health economics, data engineering, and operations, we collaborate with payers, providers, employers, life sciences, and investors to advance the field through peer-reviewed publications, policy work, and practical guidance. Through our platform, data licensing, and publications, we accelerate the adoption of high-quality pricing insights at scale.
David Muhlestein
Simple Healthcare
+1 407-464-4444
email us here
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