The Affordable Care Act is flawed, why not public pricing?

"The Affordable Care Act creates no incentive for insurance companies to reduce prices, only their margins. Why not instead create a public service that forces health care providers to lock in a price?

If health care providers were not allowed to manufacture a starting price as part of negotiation, everyone could shop for the service that suits them. Insurance would still be helpful, just like it is for normally good drivers. The masses pay into a system in case they might need it, and those with the misfortune of needing help are funded.

Medical institutions and doctors can set realistic prices, the ones that insurance companies are already negotiating. The transparency would make billing simpler and more efficient. There could be some rating system, but I doubt that belongs in a government system. But any technology company will have access to prices and could amend with ratings.

Thoughts?"

But replacing all of the private entities involved with health care overnight is not a likely next step. It should be a goal, eventually.

But the insurance companies, lobbyists and the big pharmas don't want this transparency. They make record profits only because of this non-transparency. Imagine the jobs of hundreds of medical billers, transcriptionists going away as well if this whole healthcare "thing" becomes simpler.

Warning: Completely tangential musing/rant...

That "eventually" word is killing me. When we leave these sorts of issues up to the forces in power, they never seem to get done. What we get instead are watered-down, doomed-to-fail, design-by-political-committee "solutions" such as the ACA.

I think we need an official roadmap. I think the public deserves a direct voice in guiding the direction of the country. At the very least, I think we need to set in stone a clear vision of what milestones we want to achieve as a nation.

My entire lifetime, our leadership has repeatedly demonstrated it is incapable of moving us in any single direction long enough and far enough to be meaningful (aside from war, perhaps). Let us choose the direction; let them work-out the implementation.

/end rant

I'm just speaking my mind. What do you all think? Is this even a "good" idea? How could we even begin to make this happen?

My entire lifetime, our leadership has repeatedly demonstrated it is incapable of moving us in any single direction long enough and far enough to be meaningful (aside from war, perhaps). Let us choose the direction; let them work-out the implementation.

To some extent the back and forth you talk about is evidence that the public doesn't agree on the direction to take.