The public has been demanding healthcare transparency. Finally, three of the largest health plans have joined forces to finally shed light on claims payment data.

UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and Humana announced they will be working together with the Health Care Cost Institute to focus on healthcare transparency. They will create a payment database that will be available to the public for free.

Experts expect the database to be up and ready to go by 2015 in hopes for open enrollment.

The healthcare cost transparency is being spurred by a number of developments in the healthcare sector. The trends towards high-deductible plans is giving consumers a greater incentive to understand how much healthcare costs and to utilize it more efficiently.

Healthcare transparency has been a large debate in the past year, due to the level of difficulty to get a simple price for a basic health-care procedure.

In 2012, Steven Brill wrote a 26,000-word opus on medical bills for the Time. Not surprisingly, consumers have been picking up more of the tab for their healthcare.

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Jeffrey R. Ungvary

President