Rep. VanNatter has introduced HB 1582 which would require health care service provider to disclose certain pricing information for services.
It doesn’t look particularly workable in the form it’s in, but the legislation would essentially require health care service provider’s (I believe this means, for the most part, hospitals and clinics) to provide a price list to physicians who refer patients. Physicians, in turn, are responsible for providing patients with a price for a service they prescribe as well as a list of various providers of the service and a notice that prices may vary considerably for the same service. Additionally, there are requirements that insurers and HMOs publish the reimbursement amounts they’ll provide for various services.
It’s a laudable goal to have price transparency. All the happy talk about market forces in health care is mostly nonsense without that kind of transparency. I don’t know how well the average consumer can comparison shop in any case, but with health care’s opaque pricing structures it’s 10x as hard.
This is aside from the fact that a person who needs health care is under duress – negotiating for a heart transplant is not unlike negotiating with a gun to your head; both are a matter of life & death. And, a market approach assumes the consumer knows enough about the product to make an informed bargain; which is also problematic. But, none of it can work without readily available information about the prices.
Again, you are taking the extreme example (heart transplant) and applying it to all health care.
The vast majority of our interaction with the health care system is done under circumstances where we are perfectly able to be educated consumers.
I suggest that areas where we are not able to negotiate, like your heart transplant example, would most likely be taken care of by an insurance company (or a single payer system) anyway, as their cost is far beyond the means of 99% of the population.
I consider myself more intelligent than the average individual, yet when presented with a choice of three plans at work I was driven to consult my boss, Human Resources, my brother-in-law, my mom, my live-in girlfriend and a bottle of antacid. Then I guessed.
This is the worst part of my interaction with the healthcare system, and it occurs annually: open enrollment.