Last week, the Los Angeles Times published a piece on the difficulty of California consumers to get “straightforward answers about the cost of common medical procedures despite state efforts aimed at lifting the veil on medical pricing.” They describe a California state law from 2006 wherein hospitals are required to publish their average charges for the most common procedures.
They go on to say: “…some hospitals do make it easier. On its website, Huntington Memorial allows people to select several common procedures and get an instant price quote, including an estimate of the patient's share after plugging in their deductible and coinsurance. But even those numbers exclude the thousands of dollars that physicians, anesthesiologists and other specialists would tack on for most surgeries.”
The tool they are discussing is our Procedure Pricing Tool
Following the piece in the Times,
Martha Bebinger from WBUR in Boston, posted on
Healthcare Savvy, “This is an astonishing display of price information…astonishing because posting prices for anything is almost unheard of at hospitals in the U.S.”
Read the full L.A. Times Story HERE
Read the full Healthcare Savvy piece HERE