Plain Talk With Rob Port

On previous episodes of Plain Talk, North Dakota Insurance Commisisoner Jon Godfread and Chris Jones, the former head of the state Department of Health and Human Services who is just wrapping up a stint as an adviser in President Donald Trump's administration, argued that health care pricing is opaque. They said that lack of transparency contributes to spiraling health care costs, and thus the rising cost of health insurance. Godfread, specifically, pointed to research his office has done in North Dakota -- he's called it a "secret shopper" study -- showing wide disparities in pricing for routine procedures between the state's hospitals. In some cases, the price difference is as much as 600%. For his part, Jones said that spiral prices for care, driving spiral prices for insurance, are bringing us "precipitously close to having a significant issue with access to health care." What do the people who charge those prices have to say about it? Tim Blasl, the president of the North Dakota Hospital Association,