This is the desklight from conof. I don't see anywhere on their website to buy it. If you are in the business of selling products and someone hits your site, interested in your product, "buy it here" is the logical link to present the user with.

The same with the Nikon camera on this website. I clicked through to Amazon as I am interested in a camera that can handle dim light better than my current one. I wanted to know how expensive it was, but under price there is the line, "To see our price, add this item to your cart. You can always remove it later. Why don't we show the price?" I was interested enough to put it into the cart, after I whinged about it first, and for those interested it was $1,400 or so. I don't see why I had to put it in my cart to see how expensive it was. And for FWIW I didn't read their explanation as to why, I don't care enough.

Some more incongruities. If the free market is supposed to aid in price transparency, the most opaque industry I have come across is the US health care system. Prior to the operation on my shoulder I could not get a price out of anyone. I was told numerous times about the 90:10 and 70:30 for out/in coverage. It was also made clear that the Doctor, Anaethesiologist and Medical Center would all bill me independently. But I could not get dollar amounts. The bills trickled in and it wasn't that much, but still I would have liked to have known my liabilities before hand. I was in enough pain however that I would have paid a lot more to have it go away.

Neal Krawitz writes that each year a large industry has collapsed in upon itself; insurance, finance, automotive. He argues that the aspects these industries shared were lack of transparency, over complication and a reliance on old technologies. His next candidate for complete and catastrophic collapse is health care for the same reasons:

So hospitals lack transparency and cannot give even a vague estimate for something simple. And the entire process, from the hospital to insurance, is overly complicated, vague on details, and intentionally confusing.

I had similar issues when having my shoulder operated on. I kept asking for how much it would cost me out of pocket and no-one was able to give me an answer. I got told all about 90/10 percentages; but no-one would give me a ballpark figure for how far out of pocket I would be.

If the purpose of a private health system that follows the free market is price transparency, then the US health care system fails it, and fails it horribly. Maybe the health care system needs to fail catastrophically in order to shake it up and weed out all the inefficiencies that have grown over the years; but the reality is they will get a bailout, like all the other industries that have failed catastrophically and no longer been economically viable.

The WSJ has an article how Safeway cut its healthcare costs by making employees be more careful about the costs of their healthcare visits. The journal notes:

We're going to go out on a limb and guess that the scheme has its critics and flaws, but this sounds like the right idea. Use insurance as it's meant to be used (as protection against rare events, so that you don't get financially wiped out when you get hit by a car on your bike) and then create real incentives to stay healthy and reduce costs on the routine stuff. What's great is that it doesn't even sound like something that needs anyone's approval. Any company, looking at the Safeway model, should just be able to up and do it.

Insurance is meant as catastrophic cover, not routine healthcare, and in this the WSJ is correct. This is one of the reasons that US healthcare is so inefficient cost wise. The other problem is that there is no price transparency in the US in relation to healthcare. You cannot get a direct quote of cost out of anyone. Companies adopting policies like this might improve that aspect of the health system.

The culture of health is a good one. In this office we do mad mile time trials and one of the fellows just started training for a triathlon sprint which others in here might do as well (including me). The office here has a culture of fitness and strength, but it isn't because of the company, it is because of the personalities here. Recently when a new CTO came and did a video conference call with all the people in Phoenix, seven of us (out of a total of fourteen) were absent because we were at the gym.

The main problem with the US healthcare system though is that companies are paying for it. The WSJ doesn't ask this question. It stems from World War II and the Norfolk docks in Virginia where labor was excessively tight and ships needed to be built in lightning fast time. The employers there started offering healthcare as an incentive to get the best labor. Now it is an assumed right that companies will pay for health care which has led to one of the most inefficient health care systems on the planet.

I mirror this concern that the US health care system has no price transparency. When I had my shoulder operated on I tried to find out what my liabilities were. The hospital and other places were able to tell me what percentage my co-pay was but none could give me even a ballpark figure as to what my surgery would cost. I essentially had the operation not knowing what I would be up for.

As a private system it fails in price transparency. As a consequence ringing around other hospitals and other surgeons to price shop was not possible. I could not judge or rate the services based on cost.