It's a little different. It's more like hiring someone as personal buyer who buys for likely a large group of people. A majority of people don't actually use the $3600+ they spend per year on health insurance so the money adds up fast and the buyer doesn't have time to deal with individuals so they don't seem to question paying $$$ for a tissue paper. The amount of money they are authorized to spend is so large that a $$$ tissue paper is just an insignificant percentage of the total available cash.

If hospitals and insurance companies are already tracking their income/expenses they should just be required to publish the anonymized data via a centralized API so we can all work on creating systems to analyze the average cost of the products. It will help insurance companies and patients as well as doctors and everyone in the end. Also, beyond the standardized API system which should easily cover all the standard financial points we can have multiple people / organizations analyzing the data.

Say one particular health issue shows up in the system as costing a lot of the insurance cash pool, we would notice it right away and could funnel more cash into prevention.

I'm not familiar with the industry so maybe there is already something similar available?