Prices in Healthcare

For months now the national and local news has focused on the price of gas.  $3.79 per gallon this week in my part of the San Francisco Bay area. At Costco it is $3.59 per gallon, if you are willing to wait in line.  Of course there is a website that will tell you gas prices and map them by location.  Need to price a new television?  Go online and price shop.  Interested in quality of the television?  Check out Consumers Reports or another such source.   Standing in the audio store?  Pull out your iPhone, bring up the RedLaser application and scan the bar code.   It will give you the price of that television in some other nearby stores. 

So how about healthcare?  Well I shopped my Lasix eye surgery years ago for price and quality.  I of course paid for all of it.    I also get my dental care from a great, but not cheap, dentist.  I need a crown, his staff quotes me the price.  I have dental insurance, which pays a part of the price and they tell me that amount and the amount of the price I pay.  I can shop if I need to for better prices, but I don’t for another dentist.

So let’s take a simple healthcare procedure.  I need my appendix out.  (Not really, and I still have mine….but an example.)  I want to know the price from hospital choices in the area.  Can the hospital tell me?  Can anyone tell me?   My neighbors know the gas prices, but could they answer a question on healthcare price?   Can I get the info online?  Can I get much info about which surgeon is the best person to take out my appendix, let alone his price for doing so?

So think about it.  How well does this type of purchase work when we don’t know the prices, let alone the typical quality of the service we are buying?  More on this subject next blog when I get into: prices vs. costs, the impact of insurance, and other such fun areas of healthcare.