Two months ago, I moved into a new apartment. On the first night, in the dark, I tripped and fell. It felt like I had badly scraped my shoulder, but when I looked in the mirror there was no torn skin—my collarbone was simply jutting at a new, funny angle. When I tried to push it back into place, I got nauseated, so I decided to try to sleep. I’ll wake up soon, I thought, and just pretend this never happened.

When that didn’t work, I Googled “rotator cuff tear” and “asymmetric shoulder.” It seemed like a benign possibility; lots of people with rotator-cuff tears lead healthy and productive lives. No luck. I called my mom, who happened to be visiting for the night and was at a hotel two blocks away (and who, like me, happens to be a cardiologist). When she arrived, we made a video of my shoulder to send to my orthopedist cousin for a diagnosis—a clever idea except for the fact that he was sound asleep. Our delay tactics exhausted, we faced the inevitable: I needed to go to the emergency room.

Next thing I knew, I was standing with my pokey shoulder in front of an X-ray machine. My mother called out to me from the radiology reading room: “You broke your clavicle.”

“O.K.,” I called back.

After being diagnosed, the rational next step would have been to turn my attention toward treatment. Instead, when two additional X-rays were taken, an orthopedist was called to review the films, and two slings were provided instead of one, I wasn’t thinking about what I needed to do to get better. I was doing arithmetic: How much was all of this going to cost?

“You’re so tough,” my mom said, when I refused, for about the fifth time, to even take a Tylenol.

“It’s not that,” I said. I waited until the nice doctor walked away and whispered, “Did you not hear about the toothbrush?”

The thousand-dollar toothbrush, to which I was referring, had first gained notoriety in 2010, when featured, among other absurdities like twenty-three-dollar alcohol pads and fifty-three-dollar disposable gloves, in a CNN special on exorbitant health-care pricing. Three years later, the buzz around said toothbrush grew when the New York Times reporter Tina Rosenberg published a widely circulated piece called “The Cure for the $1,000 Toothbrush,” which described how the lack of price transparency in health care contributes to its exorbitant costs, and financial ruin for many Americans. Those pieces, along with Elizabeth Rosenthal’s five-part Times series and Steven Brill’s twenty-eight-page Time cover story, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us,” have made the lack of price transparency in health care an intensely debated topic for both policymakers and the public. And it’s why sitting perfectly still to avoid pain made more sense to me than accepting a Tylenol, which I feared would cost me a hundred times more than what I would pay at the CVS next door.

The obvious antidote to price opacity is price transparency, but such transparency may have a range of effects, depending on where it is applied in the many layers of health-care delivery. For instance, there is emerging evidence that when hospitals publish prices for surgical procedures, costs decrease without a loss of quality. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, for example, has been publishing its prices for various procedures for the past four years. Because the center’s prices tend to be lower than those of other hospitals, patients started coming from all over the country for treatment. In order to compete, other hospitals in Oklahoma began listing surgical prices; patients were able to comparison shop, and hospitals lowered their prices.

The calls for price transparency, though, have now moved beyond the hospital walls. In two recent opinion pieces, Peter Ubel and colleagues argue that doctors ought to directly disclose to patients the costs of recommended treatments. Out-of-pocket costs, they argue, can “cause more distress in patients’ lives than many medical side effects, and patients can decide whether any of the downsides of treatment are justified by the benefits.”

We must find better ways to make affordable, high-quality health care available to everyone. But is injecting price transparency into the patient-doctor dynamic by asking patients to consider costs a step toward achieving those aims? Or will we end up hurting most those we are trying to help?

The first problem with financial disclosure from doctor to patient is a practical one. Doctors rarely know how much their patients actually pay. Patients are covered by a variety of insurers, all of whom offer several plans, for which any individual patient has a different copayment and deductible, which he may or may not have met.

Let’s say, though, with a click of a button, a patient’s out-of-pocket costs for any given recommendation are readily available to both doctor and patient. There will be some situations for which two treatments with similar risk-benefit profiles exist, but costs are clearly divergent. Patients with systemic lupus, for example, often choose between two drugs, Imuran and CellCept; the benefits and risks of the drugs are similar, but the latter costs ten times as much. Under these circumstances, asking a patient to consider price in their choices seems wise.

But many common clinical scenarios are more complicated. Take heart-attack treatment, for which, Ubel and colleagues note, costs can approach forty thousand dollars per year. (The report from which the figure is derived actually suggests a range of three thousand dollars to forty thousand dollars, depending on the plan.) Heart-attack care typically begins when a patient comes to the emergency room with chest pain. A stent procedure to open a blocked artery is often life-saving, but only if done quickly. The longer you wait, the more heart muscle dies.

During my cardiology training, it was my job to describe the benefits and risks of this procedure to patients, and ask them to sign consent forms. I went over each risk in painstaking, non-jargon-y detail. You quickly learn, though, that certain risks are far more disturbing than others. Say “kidney damage,” which, while unlikely, is one of the more common complications, and most people seem relatively unfazed. Say “limb loss,” however—which, while possible, is unbelievably rare—and people panic. In weighing risks and benefits in these situations, it’s not the likelihood of the risk that matters but the ease of imagining it.

Now consider this same scenario and add to the list of potential risks, “Full disclosure: this might cost you as much as forty thousand dollars.” All of a sudden you have injected into a litany of the unfamiliar a “risk” that could not be more familiar: money. Who would not fixate upon this cost information in making medical decisions?

It’s also hard to quantify and convincingly describe the long-term costs of not getting treatment. So while it may be possible to tell someone the cost of a stent procedure, it will always be much more difficult to put a price on not getting the stent—which often includes frequent hospitalizations for heart failure, complicated medical regimens requiring intensive lab monitoring, devices to help the heart pump more efficiently, and sometimes even a heart transplant.