Health care in theUnitedStateshas come to resemble a “menu without prices” for both physicians and patients, who systematically lack access to the prices of treatments, procedures, and diagnostic tests. This firewall may once have served an ethical purpose that allowed people to get care before anyone assessed their ability to pay and fueled an idealized image of the impartial physician making price-naive medical decisions on behalf of one patient at a time. However, rising cancer care costs and increased patient cost sharing now contribute to unanticipated and financially devastating out-of-pocket expenses for patients and families. Prices and coverage levels can vary substantially without evidence of a link between price and quality. We propose that complete price transparency for people with cancer can transform health care more than current efforts, is an integral part of patientcentered care, and may decrease risk of patient financial hardship, waste, and price variation, while improving care quality. Price transparency efforts to date have focused on policyand physician-focused initiatives that seek to reduce variation and unnecessary ordering. In policy-level initiatives, variation in cost and quality is exposed to encourage consumers to select high-value providers and incentivize institutions to remain competitive by lowering costs or improving quality. Costcalculator tools, usually payer-sponsored, have emerged rapidly and are now legislative requirements in some states. These tools allow comparison by price or quality for a defined set of care episodes such as joint replacements or childbirth, but they have had limited uptake and are unable to support the needs of oncology patients whose treatment plans are highly individualized and ever-changing. Increasingly, specialty societies are identifying low-value practices through initiatives such as Choosing Wisely. In physician-level price transparency efforts, physicians are educated about the prices of selected tests to discourage frivolous ordering and encourage use of highervalue care. Such price posting may alter physician behavior for laboratory test ordering andmay lower costs as bundled payment structures emerge.However, it is not clear that oncologists will decrease the prescribing of expensive drugs and procedures or use fewer staging and surveillance tests such as positron emission tomography scans or tumor markers. Physicianand policy-focused initiatives take place in the margins of medical care on specific scenarios with demonstrated variation or overuse. They will not impact most medical decisions—those that are not unnecessary, for which there is no less expensive alternative, or for which there is no alternative at all. Patients, who receive all medical care and are increasingly at risk for medical financial burden, have a right to know prices if they so wish. Furthermore, transparency focused on exposing variation may have unintended consequences of encouraging volumebased ordering or in encouraging lowerpriced providers to raise prices. We suggest a patient-centered definition of price transparency, one in which a patient