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Sometimes the cost is bigger than the cost in a different country plus the plane ticket.
I guess you could roll the dice and hope the for best but you will lose your ability to sue the hospital for malpractice if they mess up.
Just because other countries medical & legal systems are different than the US doesn't mean they are inferior.
Why are the prices so insane? Where do the money go? I'm from Eastern Europe so of course the prices would be different, but by an order of a magnitude at the minimum seems strange.
- paying for services for people who don't have/can't afford insurance. - medical malpractice insurance -> legal system - big pharma/med devices industry
- Gold plating everything to avoid getting sued.
- Inflated medical school costs
- the price of a huge bureaucracy for billing people, chasing them, disputing it, agreeing rates with insurers, renegotiating rates with insurers, applying the right discounts, billing a dozen different state and federal programs for various bits, those being disputed, managing all that etc.
Is there a Walmart for medical procedures? A jiffy-lube?
You can pay for the trip, get the best care (it is a really good, international level, hospital) and still have some loney left.
It would be nice to be able to see the lowest & highest prices & other stats. I can manually find the lowest price by sorting by price but I can't seem to reverse it to show the highest price first... Anyway, it seems that there are orders of magnitude differences for the same service. The service 'MRI Lumbar Spine With & Without Contrast Material' has a lowest price of $210 while the closest and highest I personally…
In 2015 I did several months of due diligence in this market - price comparison for diagnostic imaging - before concluding that it wasn't feasible to build the product we wanted to build. This new law provides the data that we were unable to access (at scale) on our own. From the data we did get our hands on, I remember seeing price differences like $200 vs $4k for the exact same procedure. The low cost provider was…
Is there a Walmart for medical procedures? A jiffy-lube?
Why are the prices so insane? Where do the money go? I'm from Eastern Europe so of course the prices would be different, but by an order of a magnitude at the minimum seems strange.
For example ultrasonic diagnosis of your frozen shoulder is 600 Euros in USA, 200 Euros in Finland and 80 Euros in Vilnius.
This issue is relevant, because European healthcare wont fix your shoulder, because it is a "cosmetic problem" and will disappear on its own in a year or two.
Sometimes the cost is bigger than the cost in a different country plus the plane ticket.
This was a big accomplishment of the Trump admin. Regardless of what your other opinions of his administration are, healthcare pricing transparency in the US is a very important step forward to improving the healthcare situation there. Source (one of many): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-drugs/white-hou...
It’s too bad that all the other insane things he did will overshadow literally anything of value that he accomplished.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess you could roll the dice and hope the for best but you will lose your ability to sue the hospital for malpractice if they mess up.
You're making a lot of assumptions here that an out-of-country hospital would be of questionable quality and not have medical malpractice laws. Just because other countries medical & legal systems are different than the US doesn't mean they are inferior.
A country can have a fine legal system for locals that's difficult or prohibitively expensive to access for non-citizens living outside the country.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How can there be such a large difference in price for something that, I believe, is legally & medically the same procedure? If no one publishes their prices how do you set yours? 2 dollars? 2000 dollars? 2m dollars?
I am pretty sure the providers and insurers know exactly what everyone is charging. It’s the patients that are being kept in the dark.