For decades, the model that has dominated health care is a health plan that competes with other health plans to sell itself and grow bigger by getting “the best discounts” with hospitals and physician groups. This is a “B toB” or business-to-business model. Left out of that equation? Employers and employees who suffer increased basic unit costs, hidden by the promise of better discounts. Meanwhile, insurers continue to pass these inflated unit costs as increased premiums for more than 20 years now. Now a health plan promises to disrupt that model with a B-C or business-to-consumer marketing model whereby prices that were once held more private than the recipe for Coca-Cola are now being made public. As the recent article in Forbes highlights, one health system has already asked that its prices be reduced so as to be more competitive.

Here’s our simple thought on this basic business approach: It’s about time. It’s about time that rational, proven, free-market principles that have made other consumer goods and services more affordable be introduced in health care. Lets see those prices, lets preserve consumer choice and provider competition. Lets end “exclusive networks”, opaque pricing, and competition on so-called discounts that perpetuate the old B-B model.

It’s about time.