In a recent hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform (go to the 16:37 mark here), Congressman James Lankford (R-Okla.) lauded the Surgery Center of Oklahoma as a facility where “competition has driven up quality and driven down price.”

He’s right. Just ask Jerome Longacre, a fitness trainer in Bartlesville who was faced with the prospect of scraping together $15,000 to get his torn ACL repaired at the local hospital in Bartlesville. When Mr. Longacre learned that the Surgery Center’s price was less than $7,000, he asked the Bartlesville hospital to match it. They did.

“If someone else somewhere else has a better product or a lower price for the same product, that fact gets conveyed and acted upon through prices,” economist Thomas Sowell has written. And with various medical facilities starting to post their prices for the entire world to see, it’s starting to happen more and more in health care — to the great benefit of health-care consumers. - See more at: https://afternoon-plains-9177.herokuapp.com/articles/2333#sthash.IMkGNaQU.dpuf