Yeah wouldn’t be nice if a hospital handed you a “menu” of surgical costs so instead of hearing from your insurer you can just pick from the list? Let’s see that ACL/MCL repair surgery will cost a total of $5,670.57. Well I got the $70.57, better dip into the savings or 4O1k fund for the rest… Wait he doc can we negotiate, how about $5k even and I’ll carry your clubs for the summer?” PB/TK
“What Happens When Doctors Only Take Cash”? Everybody, Especially Patients, Wins
The Oklahoma City Surgery Center is a model for how medical care can be better, faster, cheaper.
Nick Gillespie|
Anyone who has ever tried to shop around for prices on medical care knows how dysfunctional the market is. It’s not because huge amounts of money isn’t changing hands; it’s that nobody really knows what anything costs at any given moment in time.
When I first moved to Los Angeles from Buffalo, my then-wife was pregnant with our first child and we were on a grad-student plan that didn’t travel far beyond Western New York. Reason’s benefits might not kick in until after our son was born, so I called around to area hospitals to try and find out what things cost. Four hospitals refused to give me any information, saying that they could not (and would not) price out anything. Part of that’s understandable—what if something went seriously wrong?—but the people I spoke to refused to even say what basic charges were for things like delivery room time, anesthetics, and the like. Of course they have rate sheets for all that but share them with potential customers? Go fuck yourself, buddy.
For good reason: These costs are completely contingent on a wide variety of factors, especially what insurance plan you have or whether you have insurance at all. More recently, I’ve had the same problem trying to price out basic blood tests (a lipid panel) in southwestern Ohio, as simple and mechanical a procedure as exists. Without clear pricing, we’ll never get far in radically improving the cost and quality of care for non-emergency services. In areas that are not traditionally covered by insurance—think Lasik surgery, cosmetic dentistry, and plastic surgery—a very different model obtains and you see exactly the sort of market-driven efficiencies that we see in virtually every other part of our commercial lives. The surgeon Jeffrey Singer has written about how various insurance contracts bar him from even discussing discounted cash payments with patients who announce they have insurance.
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