Without this capability, shopping around for healthcare is absolutely impossible. How can you shop around when the prices aren't publically listed and aren't known by the staff/physicians?
This article, by the way, is terrible. He gives horrifically bad advice, acting as if the majority of clinics/hospitals actually discount costs for the uninsured. THEY DON'T, as the vastly better researched article "The Bitter Pill" from Time Magazine last week clearly illustrated.
I've been a consumer asking for prices as part of a HSA high deductible health plan before. There is no mechanism to support shopping around at all, and the clinics/hospitals still act on a zero price transparency model. See the "chargemasters" discussed in the Time article. They are databases of prices which are not at all publically accessible.
The federal gov't should step in, and, at a minimum, force hospitals/clinics to make their chargemaster databases publically accessible. This would be a game changer for consumers in health care.
I mean, when the insurance company negotiates to pay higher prices, they are lying to overstate their benefit and justify higher prices. Hospitals are complicit in this scheme. But hospitals make more from higher margins, and insurance companies can justify greater prices.
It's a broken system when both buyer and seller want to negotiate the highest price they can in secret, away from the person who is funding the buyer.