How much health insurers pay for almost everything is about to go public

Only if there is no competition and no free market[1]

If you are locked into "choosing" the one in-network service provider in your area who can price very differently for your insurance than for others yes there is room for perverse incentives as is today.

If you and I can choose freely from any service provider in the area and everyone has to price the same way( i.e. not change basis who the customer is) then they will have to be competitive, people are very price sensitive and will tend to move towards the ones which are cheaper.

See how the airlines all slowly have moved towards the low-cost models: more economy/less first class even if they were full service. Sure you will have some Frontier/Spirit type organizations eventually but if they get the job done(Moving you from A to B) at lowest price then that is all that matters[3], similarly if a hospital is no-frills and gets your cataract operation[2] or do regular checkup faster and cheaper they will do so and plenty of people benefit from that.

Force hospitals to compete, not lock into monopolistic preferential contracts with some buyers and force users to now be exhorted crazy premiums to avoid the possibility being charged even more. Price regulation does not mean government fixes the prices, it should just mean that service provider have to charge the same for anyone without knowing their source (which insurance plan/company or self-funded and income level).

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[1] While there are some cases where two hospitals / doctors are not equivalent and cannot be compared, vast majority of care is fungible, i.e. you can replace one hospital / doctor with another without material impact to outcome of care.

[2] I have seen this myself work https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Ideas/Speeches/2008/05/willi... it is like assembly line, brutal efficiency.

[3] This assumes robust regulation, which we already have in healthcare, probably more so than required, there is no systemic regulatory oversight problems in the industry today.

People keep complaining government is too complicated and too expensive and bafoonish, yet they don't see how corporations are no different except their priority is maximizing profit not providing cost-efficient quality.

Disclaimer: I am a physician.

Physician salaries represent a small fraction of overall healthcare costs. Nursing/allied health salaries make up the bulk of any hospital’s costs and are often bloated due to powerful unions physicians don’t have.

For comparison, Canadian physicians are on average better compensated than American physicians.

I practice radiology, a specialty often considered “overpaid” yet my compensation is only high because of the amount of advanced studies ordered in modern medicine. On a per study basis I get paid less and less every year yet scans are getting more and more complex (many studies on this). In addition the standard to which I am held to keeps rising and I spend a significant amount of time doing unpaid QA, following up on my reports to improve my ROC, and at least a few hours every week reading the latest publications in my sub specialty.

The average diagnostic radiologist in the USA is grossing around 400k (no retirement fund, pension, and commonly no benefits).

What is reasonable compensation in your opinion for someone who has finished 10+ years of post-undergrad training and accepts significant liability for every report (a radiologist at HMS missed a lung nodule on an X-ray and lost 16 million in court)?

The point (in theory) is that in efficient markets you can choose between different companies offering a product/service and that competition drives down prices / costs. The healthcare market in the US is very much not a competitive market (in part due to transparency issues which this is trying to address, in part because of the perverse incentives in the health insurance system).

It's not so easy to have a competitive marketplace for government services (though I would not be surprised if the US saw the emergence of private police forces now, for those parents who actually want police officers that have a duty to protect their kids...)

as european i am not entirely convinced that it makes sense to have hundreds of companies providing the same heavily regulated service.

if there were too few of those i would probably also object.

idk about the situation where there are no private companies involved at all and the government takes over healthcare top to bottom because on the one hand i see a massive problem with for profit healtcare as it is and on the other hand i can see how incentives would wither away if there is no drive for efficiency at all.