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You can now look up charges at your local hospital. Good luck understanding them.

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You can now look up charges at your local hospital. Good luck understanding them.

January 16, 2019

You can now look up charges at your local hospital. Good luck understanding them.

The Trump administration rang in 2019 by enacting a seemingly great health care policy: requiring all hospitals to list the price of their most common procedures on their websites.

The whole idea was to make the American health care system more transparent, allowing patients to research the cost of care at thousands of hospitals across the country.

All in all, it seemed like a common-sense and well-intentioned policy to liberalize health care data. And, on January 1, the policy rolled out into the real world. We’ve quickly seen some big shortcomings in this effort to increase price transparency — ones that tell us a lot about how hard it is to give patients good cost estimates in a health care system rife with secretive prices.

One of the biggest shortcomings? The data that hospitals are posting can be hard to find, and difficult to parse. I looked up the prices at some of my local hospitals in DC.

It usually took me about five to 10 minutes of searching around their websites to locate the price data — not great, but not terrible either. Once I did find it. ... That’s where things got interesting.

The full Vox article can be viewed at this link.  

 

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