Very hesitant that this is the actual problem of healthcare. What you care about is not how much the hospital bills, but how much is leftover after insurance. And that is unknown to all parties.
There is no "the" problem of healthcare. There are many, many interlocking issues that combine to drive up prices at every step of the way in every corner of the industry.
This might help a little bit, but there is no silver bullet.
I agree 100%, just that in the scope of price transparency this is not the real price, discounting all other economic effects that are not apparent in prices.
I disagree, I think the interlocking issue is that few industries have as much public support for its vested interests as healthcare and education. Anyone can get away with anything because the public is generally tricked by a simplistic understanding of what medicine is, and consequently support terrible policies.
You could drop the cost of care just de-regulating. But Milton Friedman failed, who would succeed today on that path?
"You could drop the cost of care just de-regulating"
That's a huge oversimplification and isn't true in many cases, for example when a single drug company owns the patent on a life saving drug. The laws of supply and demand are not in favor of those who require that drug to live.
> for example when a single drug company owns the patent on a life saving drug
Patents are a form of regulation. De-regulating would include voiding those patents. The government created that monopoly and all its attendant problems; there is absolutely no reason why it can't remove it just as easily.
In the USA, at least, there is a singular problem: In the early 70s, the HMO Act and similar legislation was passed, bringing in the HMO-oriented system of healthcare.
A silver bullet would consist of introducing a single-payer system and winding down the HMOs.
HMO's are very successful in terms of providing cost/care solutions. The fact that they are so unpopular reveals the american preference: they want to see any doctor, at any time, with as much access as possible.
Anecdata: A nuclear family member was the president of an HMO for a few years, as far as I know they successfully pooled Medicare resources and made group-wide decisions that saved a lot of money.
It's unknown right now. I don't think this problem is something that can be resolved in one all encompassing change.
We can start with the medical facilities, who will literally lose nothing by having transparency in their pricing. Now you can compare hospital prices; great!
Next we can expose the insurance companies policies per code, and we can apply them to each hospital. I could imagine tools where you select your plan, then select what you'll need.
Yes, I know there are well over 10k codes, and this can get complicated. But that doesn't mean we should just give up.
> Very hesitant that this is the actual problem of healthcare. What you care about is not how much the hospital bills, but how much is leftover after insurance. And that is unknown to all parties.
It's a start. Right now I have no idea what a hospital bill will be. If I know that I can figure out what will be left over after insurance (or even, what the cost will be when insurance company routinely denies a claim because they can.)
All progress is incremental. And pooh-poohing a small step forward is IMO what's holding us back.
This order targets negotiated prices, not hospital chargemaster prices.
Many (most?) hospitals will give you semi-accurate estimates if you hassle them long enough these days; I recently spent a month and a half and a dozen phone calls getting an accurate estimate from UCSF on a predictable medical procedure (cost: $3,300 OOP on a $10,000 negotiated rate).
