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.
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
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").