What if you were handed a bill when you visited the hospital?

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Earlier this week, David Musyj, the chief executive officer of the Windsor Regional Hospital, proposed that all patients be provided with an annual summary of the costs they have incurred in the public health system.

The idea has been around as long as medicare itself. Before that, people had real bills they had to pay, not pretend ones to ponder.

In fact, the very reason medicare was created was because so many people could not pay their bills or afford premiums for private insurance.

A public insurance plan – what we call medicare – spreads the risk across the entire population.

We know the cost of that: $148-billion in 2013, or $4,192 per person in public funds. (We spend another $63-billion, or $1,796 per capita, privately.)

Of course, those are averages. Not everyone's care costs the same and not everyone pays the same amount of taxes. In any given year, most people need minimal medical care but, over a lifetime, the average Canadian uses about $220,000 in publicly-funded health services.

Again, there is a wide variation: Most people don't get really sick (read: expensive) until the end-of-life. Some have a dizzying array of health challenges. In fact, a tiny percentage of the population – 5 per cent – accounts for half of all health spending.

We tend to get self-righteous about the so-called million-dollar patients, but anyone could potentially be struck by a catastrophic illness that propels them into that high-cost group. Again, this is why we have insurance, to spread risk, the share the financial pain.

But do we need to know how many or how little any given individual costs the system?

The idea is an attractive one, at least superficially.

Mr. Musyi argues that transparency is a good thing. True, it's a lovely principle.

But where we really need transparency is about the value of care we provide. Is the distribution of our health spending – a lot on hospitals and physicians, very little on prevention and rehabilitation – hitting the right balance? Are the procedures we do, the drugs we prescribe, and so on, effective and cost-efficient?

That's the data could really benefit from having and pondering: It could help improve the quality of care and help ensure we get more bang for the buck.

Paying for what works: There's a principle that hospital CEOs and other health care leaders should be advocating.

But mathematical calculations of the cost of individual patient care? That sort of transparency is useful in a competitive marketplace, where there are wide price variations, like the U.S.

In a monopsony, however, there is essentially no competition and therefore little price variation.

Beyond the curiosity factor, beyond the voyeurism, what purpose would it serve to tell people the cost of care on an individual level?

Will providing itemized bills make the health system any more efficient or cost-effective? Or will it simply add an unneeded level of bureaucracy, tinged with self-righteousness?

The idea of shadow bills, or whatever you want to call them, floats up to the surface with predictable regularity, just before provincial elections, then it tends to fade away again.

It's even been tried in a couple of different ways. Alberta conducted a pilot project in the early 1980s where patients were asked to sign off on mock bills when they went to the doctor or the hospital, to give them a sense of the cost of their care.

Later, in the late 1980s, when Alberta introduced health premiums, the province sent annual statements to show each citizen the cost of health services that were billed under their provincial health insurance number.

In both instances, the experiment was short-lived. Why? It was a huge administrative headache with no financial or political payoff. If anything, underscoring the cost of individuals' care irritated them.

The public is insightful enough to recognize that if you are sending them a bill or statement, the intention is ultimately to change their behavior (read: save money).

There is no evidence to support this contention that knowledge of health costs affects demand for services. In reality, consumers have little choice around the types and intensity of services they receive and no choice of lower- (or higher-) priced alternatives.

Patients may feel guilty (for no good reason) upon receiving a mock bill but they cannot be "scared straight."

If your granny slips on an icy sidewalk, falls and breaks her hip, then spends the next 21 days in the hospital, does she need an itemized bill telling her that the care she received cost $30,000?

No. She needs salt on the walk, not salt in her wounds.

The notion that there is widespread abuse and overuse because our health care is "free" is a canard. One would be hard-pressed to identify anyone who goes to the hospital for fun. It's pretty condescending to suggest so.

The other principal argument that Mr. Musyj made was that the technology exists to provide the information so we might as well do it.

While it's true that we have computer software that can spew out dizzying reams of data, why would we single out health costs as something that needs to be shared?

If we truly want to improve care and reduce costs we should use health technology to do things that are proven to help improve the efficiency of care and save money.

Use those fancy computers to send people reminders of their appointments; provide them with educational material on the proper use of medications; do follow-up calls after hospital discharge to see if patients are suffering side effects as a way of minimizing costly hospital re-admissions.

If you want healthier, more responsible patients, you need to educate and empower them.

You don't do that with useless financial information, you do it with useful medical information.

André Picard is The Globe's health columnist.