Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
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Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#2Full openness is a good first step to make this insane system a little better. Next step would be for hospitals to quote the same price for the same procedure no matter if or where you are insured. I can’t think of another business where prices are different by hundreds of percent for different customer groups.
Also get rid of the whole in and out network system.
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#3There is obviously a ways to go to create a system where price transparency is feasible, but I’m very interested in how the community might think it would affect the value based healthcare industry with respect to total cost of care management and bundled services? You cannot always look at a service in isolation because of complications on episodes like joint replacements or the impact of chronic conditions over the longitudinal total cost.
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#4When I was working in healthcare, I found out that hospital groups negotiate their own Code prices with each carrier individually.
So one group will have one rate with Blue Shield vs what another hospital will have.
Its absolute bullshit.
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If youre mandated to have insurance - then procedures should be regulated to a set cost regardless of who performs the procedure.
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#5This will probably help a bit but in an emergency people don't have the time to compare prices. And with US health care, it just takes one accident that sends you to the ER and where someone that's out of network performed a procedure to end up with a bill that's tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#6Full openness is a good first step to make this insane system a little better. Next step would be for hospitals to quote the same price for the same procedure no matter if or where you are insured. I can’t think of another business where prices are different by hundreds of percent for different customer groups. Also get rid of the whole in and out network system.
I like the idea of getting rid of in/out of network. Both recent administrations have taken steps in this direction.
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#7There is obviously a ways to go to create a system where price transparency is feasible, but I’m very interested in how the community might think it would affect the value based healthcare industry with respect to total cost of care management and bundled services? You cannot always look at a service in isolation because of complications on episodes like joint replacements or the impact of chronic conditions over the…
> You cannot always look at a service in isolation
But in the American system it's setup that you must. This is the whole "coding" thing that you hear people refer to which is taking a procedure and breaking it into individual codes that can be used in billing you/your insurance.
This was addressed in the "Methodology" section of the article:
> Data was collected for three services, determined by specific codes.
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> I’m very interested in how the community might think it would affect the value based healthcare industry with respect to total cost of care management and bundled services?
You mean... releasing pricing for individual codes.....? Finally showing that hospitals will bill different prices for the same code based on the patient's insurer...?
I read the article and all I got was that hospitals are releasing pricing information under the Trump mandate. I'm not sure what you're positing for an "effect" here as the effect is literally just transparency in hospital billing?
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#8This will probably help a bit but in an emergency people don't have the time to compare prices. And with US health care, it just takes one accident that sends you to the ER and where someone that's out of network performed a procedure to end up with a bill that's tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The whole out of network aspect in hospitals is ridiculous
Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#9Full openness is a good first step to make this insane system a little better. Next step would be for hospitals to quote the same price for the same procedure no matter if or where you are insured. I can’t think of another business where prices are different by hundreds of percent for different customer groups. Also get rid of the whole in and out network system.
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Re: Hospitals lift curtain on prices, revealing giant swings in pricing by procedure
#10Local hospital released this as an Excel spreadsheet (Chargemaster).
They have a column called "Uninsured cash price." These prices are And, no, I don't think this was by accident as they have updated this Excel spreadsheet several times and only that one column is always set to 0 size.