Hillary Clinton’s got a health care plan. Barack Obama does, too. John Edwards has a pretty little one.

They’re apparently all about the same, making your boss pay more, subsidizing this, managing that. Each of the Democratic presidential front-runners offers all the policy plumbing you could want — insurance connectors and SCHIP valves and careful soldering of every detail.

By contrast, all that conservative reformers have is a bunch of people like Mark Fisher. And they don’t even know who he is, yet.

Mr. Fisher runs a start-up in Minnesota called MedCare Compare. For $25 a year, his clients get unlimited access to prices and quality ratings for doctors, clinics, and hospitals. Your family doc says you need your knee fixed? Fisher can tell you which surgeons take your insurance, can give you an estimate from each, can tell you who does best by the measures that knee surgeons agree are most valid, and even can let you know who you can reach by bus, should that be important to you.

It’s all about connecting willing buyers and willing sellers, he says. You know, like in markets for everything else we buy.

This supposedly can’t happen. Among the single-payer true believers, the Clinton-Obama-Edwards approach is running-dog capitalism, since insurance executives won’t be shot. Yet the frontrunners’ plans are market-based in the way that Cheetos are cheddar-based. They constrain competition and simulate markets because they share a premise: That in health care, night is day, gravity pulls up, and free markets don’t work.

Markets haven’t been working, says Mr. Fisher, because we’ve taken the patient out of the game. A $20 co-pay doesn’t alter anyone’s behavior.

If, however, you’re on the hook for expected care — maybe the first couple thousand dollars a year — then you’ll start shopping. This is the idea of consumer-driven reform. Insurance gets a lot cheaper if it’s truly coverage against catastrophic costs. Care gets cheaper and better if patients shop for it instead of leaving the paying and thinking up to someone else.

Mere tinkering, scoff those favoring government-centered plans. Health savings accounts are a tool, not a plan, and are useless until we can all compare prices, and we know that will never happen.

Except it already is. Mr. Fisher, whose other job is teaching business at a college in St. Paul, reckons health care finance is poised the way retirement finance was at the dawn of the 401(k).

The claim that people would be unequipped to manage money was met with an explosion of options from index funds to hand-holding brokerages.

Now, Minnesota requires health care providers to reveal their actual charges. The results can be cumbersome to provide and to read. Mr. Fisher says he saw opportunity: “Our tool has really dehassled the environment,” he says.

Milwaukee-based Patient Care is typically hired by employers — about 150 of them nationwide — to provide cost and quality information to their workers, usually over the phone. There’s a $40,000 difference between hospitals in Green Bay for lower-back surgery, says Chief Executive Officer Jane Cooper. It’s hard for patients to figure that out on their own, and until lately, no one really had a reason to.

That’s the information her company can provide, even in places that haven’t mandated price transparency. It takes tenacity, but she can get the data.

Mona Lori hopes to get prices from the other direction — from patients. She’s a software developer in suburban Chicago who’s behind OutOfPocket.com, a just-started venture that aims to apply social networking to medical prices. You’d type in the procedure your doctor says you need, add your ZIP code, and see what other people actually paid. At the moment, you don’t see a lot unless you’re around Chicago. Ms. Lori and her colleagues are stocking the database with prices from providers, who have proved cooperative, but they’re really hoping to get users to put in prices off their insurance statements, bypassing insurers’ reticence.

In the Twin Cities, Mr. Fisher says doctors have been putting prices into MedCare Compare’s system. Their patients want it. He foresees a national rollout. “We envision this will grow at the rate of high-deductible plans,” he says.

It’ll grow because there’s a market. A few years ago, there wasn’t, leading a great many people to assume that some intrinsic dysfunction of health care meant prices would remain opaque.

Instead, a market is erupting. That’s what markets do. Given how much effort authorities put in to suppressing unwanted markets in everything from bootleg oxycodone to insider stock tips, you’d think they wouldn’t write off the possibility of markets emerging in something as fundamental as health care. Markets are as natural as human needs and arise because of them. The only reason they haven’t worked in medicine is because for half a century, we’ve striven to insulate patients from them.

So health insurance is a mess, and government-minded meddlers say they’ve got a plan all mapped out. Where’s your plan, they ask the free-market guys.

To which the answer is not a plan but the fact that, already, millions of people are looking for a price tag and so bright innovators are thinking up ways of giving them one. How exactly will they do that? Mr. Fisher’s got a notion, Ms. Cooper’s got another, and Ms. Lori another yet. The government’s primary job would be to stop getting in their way.

This is sometimes derided as free-market fundamentalism, as if it were a faith. Faith? Who needs that when you can already see markets starting to work?

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.