Washington made a bet. Force hospitals to post their prices, the theory went, and a real market would form and pull costs down. Five years on, the files are posted. The market never formed. Prices never fell. The disclosed data now run to enormous scale. Yet when researchers examined the posted files, they could not find a single hospital paid by all four major insurers on a common, fixed-price basis across both its inpatient and outpatient care. The disclosure happened. The market it was supposed to build did not.The reason is not weak enforcement, and the answer is not a sixth rule. Every number in those files was set inside a market that the disclosure cannot discipline. In nearly half of metropolitan areas, one or two hospital systems run inpatient care, and commercial prices run about 2 1/2 times what Medicare pays, rising with a system’s market share rather than its costs. A price formed under those conditions records leverage, not cost. Taxpayers carry the same overpayment because public plans are benchmarked to the same captured rates. More disclosure makes the files cleaner. It does not make the number mean more because the thing it measures is bargaining power, and bargaining power does not reduce to an honest price.