It was part because costs aren't transparent, but also because the costs were the same to me after deductible.
The only truly cost aware folks in the system would be Amish on community insurance funds or similar odd edge cases
So you shop around for quality? That is still shopping around.
If customers could try to get the highest quality for their money that also works, doesn't have to try to find the cheapest.
Wrong, there is no competition in medical care both because in the end it's not possible for lay person to make informed decisions about the spectrum of treatments available when they are under time pressure and there is no way to have choice when you have a single hospital serving a substantial area (and other ways that health care is a "natural monopoly").
Price transparency works in an environment where a consumer knows all of the choices they have to make. For medical issues we can often only guess when it comes to critical problems, and even other protracted issues that you are aware of can be complex and hard to navigate. If you think price transparency will help then I reckon you're someone that hasn't actually been critically ill before.
Like the reason why insurance companies etc don't care about price transparency is because of the above. You're demanding something that won't work and will never work, unless the government steps in and says XYZ must cost YYY.
Medicare prices for all would be a solution for example but doing so would both explode Medicare and bankrupt the hospitals
Europe arguably has more competition in the healthcare manufacturing and labor sectors than the US.
Europe has the same pharma and device companies. Im not aware of any country that has price controls.
What Europe has is purchasing controls. If something is too expensive, the national insurance plans simply dont buy it and dont provide it.
This is what the US lacks.
Health care is a situation where competition cannot be a spur to reasonable costs because individual consumers are simply not in the position to make the kind of "free market" choices that economists (or more often free market ideologues) expect they'll make.
Moreover, the malignant and abusive US health care system is in fact a product of layer upon layer of failed "efforts to create competition" intended to reduce cost "through competition" to the point that by now all the abusers really know the dance and will be profiting next year from any further or replacement layer you add this year. (and "no regulation then!" as the US 1900 results in doctors being just heroin dealers - like my great grand father interestingly enough).
Most other industrialized nations have a state run medical system that's far superior and cheaper than the US system. They didn't solve their problem with "competition".