This is almost completely meaningless unless it's paired with some serious help in figuring out the total cost of a visit.
Every service that offers this sort of price transparency I've seen so far lists the prices for single insurance billing codes at a time. A lay person isn't going to understand the total cost of the visit from that, because there's no way to figure out which billing codes are going to be make up everything that's been billed for different types of visits.
An average price also means absolutely nothing, if the variance is significant or the medical care depends on circumstances and can, as an example, vary from a single day hospitalization to a 2 week hospitalization.
While this is positive progress, I would really appreciate more effort put on actually reducing the prices themselves.
I guess the more expensive hospitals could see patients choose less expensive hospitals, and forcing them to lower their prices, but I'm not too optimistic of that happening in any meaningful way.
"A lay person isn't going to understand the total cost of the visit from that, because there's no way to figure out which billing codes are going to be make up everything that's been billed for different types of visits."
Another problem is, for many, you won't even know what your ailment and treatments will be until after.
>Another problem is, for many, you won't even know what your ailment and treatments will be until after.
Progress is progress, even if it's not perfect. Many people get diagnosed and treated on separate visits, and many more have long-term illnesses that they know relatively well. Soon there will be a proliferation of guides for common long-term illnesses like diabetes, detailing what billing codes you can expect. Eventually, I hope to be able to put a condition (say, pregnancy) along with some personal information into a computer, and get out the flow matrix telling me the probabilities of all possible futures and the costs of each. That's a long way off, but this is the first step.
When medical costs are being discussed, the relatively rare situation of being rushed in to a hospital unconscious for doctors to do a series of completely unpredictable procedures on you tends to get focused on almost exclusively. In reality, a huge fraction of medical expenses go to (comparatively) predictable things like cancer treatments, where an operation will be scheduled out two weeks in advance. Even a day's notice would be enough time for price selection to happen, if all you had to do was look at a list of providers, prices and success rates.
Every service that offers this sort of price transparency I've seen so far lists the prices for single insurance billing codes at a time. A lay person isn't going to understand the total cost of the visit from that, because there's no way to figure out which billing codes are going to be make up everything that's been billed for different types of visits.
An average price also means absolutely nothing, if the variance is significant or the medical care depends on circumstances and can, as an example, vary from a single day hospitalization to a 2 week hospitalization.
While this is positive progress, I would really appreciate more effort put on actually reducing the prices themselves.
I guess the more expensive hospitals could see patients choose less expensive hospitals, and forcing them to lower their prices, but I'm not too optimistic of that happening in any meaningful way.