New York Times: There’s no magical savings in showing prices to doctors

A New York Times article highlights a recent study from Mitesh Patel, in which physicians were exposed to a price transparency intervention when ordering laboratory tests. As the Times writes, “The researchers suspected that in the group seeing the prices, there would be a decrease in the number of tests ordered each day per patient, and that spending on these tests would go down. This didn’t happen. Over the course of a year, there were no meaningful or consistent changes in ordering by the doctors; revealing the prices didn’t change what they did much at all.”