Hospitals Must Now Post Prices. But It May Take a Brain Surgeon to Decipher Them
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If the markets are free enough I'd imagine some hospitals coming up with reasonable price lists that amortise the variance between successive operations and between the hospital and the patient. Most calls are routine anyway.
Even car repair shops are able to quote rough price ranges even if they face a lot of unknowns. They will call you back if they find something else, and at least locally should the mechanic commit to a fixed offer he's only allowed to deviate from it by X percent. And routine jobs are generally advertised with fixed prices. The shops will undoubtedly swallow some of the accidental costs themselves to provide tighter quotes which is what customers like.
Surely treating a human patient is more involved than that but the mechanism for pricing doesn't need to be. The hospital can calculate how much extra they need to add in the fixed prices to be able to "insure themselves" against the rare pathological case, to some extent. There's always the route of escalation from a routine operation to operating an acute trauma, but I can't imagine that would be common enough to explain the inability to provide reasonable quote ranges.
It is a giant bureaucracy that has had zero price pressure to force them to simplify. It is a function of 30 years of new inventions, complicated laws and IT as an afterthought. It akin to asking the IRS exactly how many taxable transactions exist. They have no effin' idea. They'll just push the 74,000 pages of the tax code at you and say "you figure it out"
The core key to achieve this is to separate insurance from the employer, and make health services truly compete with each other. Most people would probably end up with High deductible plans, and they will be very price sensitive to basic care costs.
GoodRx already does this somewhat with prescription medication, by getting pricing data on prescriptions from local pharmacies.
Perhaps, based on the GoodRx model, the opportunity is to improve price pressure on recurring procedures for patients who require ongoing dialysis treatment, dermatology care, physical therapy, etc. For emergency based care in hospitals, I still don't think it's a major net-win for consumers, as you don't care enough to ask about price when your leg is broken.
If I know in advance Hospital A is cheaper than and of the same quality as Hospital B, that could affect my decision around where to go for something like a broken bone. (Urgent, but not critical.)
Haven't broken a leg, so can't be sure whether I'd be functional - probably depends on how bad the break is :D
How that can be legal, I don't know.
(But if you're asking "why do we have such a crazy healthcare system," I have no answer.)
The only difference is in who we outsource our morality to. Either way we, as mere mortals, are not responsble for determining morality. Or quite literally in this case, who gets to live and who gets to die.
The markets will fix it. Believe in the markets. They are our saviours and they are a fickle beast that we mere mortals cannot understand. Their actions are mysterious and their outcomes capricious, but we must believe because they are the one true God.
A few years ago, there was a game some adolescents would play where they would run up to an unsuspecting person person and bludgeon them as hard as possible to knock them out. There have been variants of the same pattern of behavior except involving strikes to other areas.
It is absolutely justifiable to hate a person for engaging in a game that involves inflicting harm on others. This attitude to hate the game rather than those forcing it on everyone else just seeks to divest blame from the actors that perpetuate the malignant activity, to an assumption that "the game" is some mysterious standalone force that subverts the will of the participants and justifies their innocence.
In short, "the devil made me do it" is not an excuse for poor moral choices.
Lets take it even further.
I have a game.
I'm going to get all the lifesaving equipment I can, and open a facility. This facility is going to specialize in a particular type of highly asymmetric transactions, and I'm going to do everything I can to inflict the greatest financial harm I can, because gee, the way we keep score mandates I do so to keep the game going.
It's a hard realization to come to, but as human beings and individuals, our collective behavior is dependent and a composition our individual choices.
And for a not insignificant portion of our population, we have succeeded in allowing it to scrape together a world around itself where maybe it takes a week to explain the technicalities, but it doesn't take a layman more than an a 15 minutes to come to the conclusion there is something seriously wrong.
This is one of those cases where rationalization has been left unchecked or unquestioned for far too long.
To wrap around to the true meaning underlying your aphorism, which is diluted without context:
Don't hate the market participants for participating in the market; but feel free to call out the hypocrisy of dealing in grievous financial harm in trade for necessary care. If you can't question or shame the actions of the ones perpetuating the status quo, you'll never change a blessed thing.
Mrs. Bloom in Accounting is still a part of it. Even if she'd rather not think about it.
Seems like too much given to a silly one-liner for movies.
Thats what all players want. How they go about getting their advantages is the market.
That's not true. There are people who advocate for other systems, and there are people who actually find more satisfaction in everyone getting a good deal rather than themselves getting everything and screwing everyone else over.
Your statements are absolutist; I believe you are speaking from ideology.
The fundamentalist wing of the market religion does an awful lot of damage. It's quite possible to dislike how markets can be gamed, captured, distorted, abused, twisted and made to serve rich individuals without despising humans.
"Markets" simply means that mostly people can take care of each other. For the most part, that's true, and has many very positive sides.
Not true. With rationed care you can still buy additional services if you want to whereas with expensive care like in the US even the simplest problem can cost you a lot of money or bankrupt you and there is not much you can do other than hope (pray?) for the best.
With rationed care you can still buy additional services if you want
If food/fuel/etc is rationed, that's all you get without venturing into a black market, if one is available.
Ironically does tend to be possible if you're NOT a citizen of the EU, in many places.
I guess this is similar to Obamacare (not very sure though). I hear you don't get to have an insurance independent of Obamacare. But the "integration" if you will is further along in Europe.
Hospitals are already dangerous to go to since either the hospital is not covered by any given insurance plan, or the doctors at the hospital are not covered. It's pretty much impossible to get taken to a hospital that actually accepts your insurance and be treated by doctors who also accept your insurance. This has been bifurcated so precisely that it also indicates an intentional and designed conspiracy.
Do you really believe this is a conspiracy instead of, you know, healthcare is complicated and the US market isn't working?
Knowing something about hospital pricing, I looked at Johns Hopkins Hospital pricing and it looked perfectly legible. Item pricing in healthcare is pretty useless, that's just how it is.
Yes -- and I think it's pretty well documented. Though less conspiracy and more regulatory capture. Between several insurance companies - patients, doctors, and hospitals - , "not for profit" ever expanding and state sponsored hospitals, medicare, lost bills, medical debt, and somewhere in this, medicare and medicaid.
Based on the quality of published data, one could rank hospitals in order of probable honesty. Crowd sourcing estimated bills based on price data vs. actual bills would provide another metric.
If we in tech treated hospitals as being engaged in predatory wealth destruction, we could probably make a dent in the harm they cause. The most authoritative data could come from medical bill debts in collection, with signals in regard to how likely a given hospital is to make an egregious claim.
Are you serious?!
It's not even like trying to cure the symptoms of a disease. It's like trying to treat a symptom of a symptom with essential oils.
And, even if this isn't the path you'd like our healthcare system to take, isn't this new state of affairs a big opportunity for some startup?
I took a look at the Vanderbilt charges[0] mentioned at the top of the article. If they could at least provide proper medical codes for procedures like they did in the drugs export, that would make it a lot easier to cross reference procedures/etc. between hospitals.
You can look through my comment history on my complaints about it, but if these csv files or pdfs were generated with jasper reports or mirth connect (any other integration engine), its a shame that they missed out on either one extra column or one extra join to get all their corresponding codes in their exports.
To the other comments' points, yeah someone could go ahead and start cross referencing codes, if they were all there, but the problem is that most systems are usually behind in code systems (e.g ICD9 vs ICD10) or they are made up using their own internal codes. You might end up with yet another set of standard codes that you would have to map to the official codes.
Here are some value sets[1] that are listed on the HL7 site. If anyone did want to tackle this problem, start there to at least get a baseline in the types of labels/descriptions you will be seeing across the board.
[0] https://finance.vumc.org/chargemaster/
[1] http://hl7.org/fhir/us/core/terminology.html
CPT - https://www.ama-assn.org/amaone/cpt-current-procedural-termi...
SNOMED - http://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/get-snomed
ICD-10 - https://www.icd10data.com/
Also they come in some large zip files (some are nested) so if you want to process it efficiently you should probably think about reading a particular file located inside, write to disk, process it, and deleting it and move on to the next without extracting it as whole.
It seems to me it is mostly a dexterity thing. Much like a good butcher.
Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to put down brain surgeons, I just think their job is less brain power and more physical performance.
While it requires that too, being a brain surgeon is not about moving your hards delicately.
Hopefully nobody goes to a "good butcher" for your their next brain surgery...
There is a benefit to publicize the program and its shortcomings, so I am happy they wrote it up.
Searching google generically for the term "chargemasters csv download" seemed to uncover a few more hospitals.
Interestingly, I tried searching for "chargemaster" on Google Datasets search[3], and it only came back with one file. I think this shows the work needed to be done in this area (datasets search).
[1] https://finance.vumc.org/chargemaster/
[2] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/patient_care/billing-insuran...
[3] https://toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch/search?query=charge...
To me, the argument that people can "shop around" for healthcare is just peculiar. For elective / non emergency scenarios, I get it. Dentists, for example, are more likely to face pricing pressure, given that dental work tends to be non-emergency. However emergency care, which is where insurance really matters, is by definition an emergency. If you cut off a finger, you don't call ten hospitals to find out who will stitch it on the cheapest. You head to the nearest hospital so you don't lose your finger!
I'm generally quite sympathetic to Hayekian economics, but the model doesn't strike me as universal (which doesn't make it flawed, just not some grand unified theory). Behavioral economics change during time sensitive & life threatening situations in a way that "throw the rulebook out the window", so to speak.
To illustrate: I know someone who took off the top of her finger in a car door. She picked it up and drove to the nearest hospital. Database or no, the "cheapest ER near her" wouldn't have been an option. Admittedly, this is extremely, but it still communicates the point.
Let's also not forget that cheaper often is correlated with a worse standard of care. The nearest ER happened to be a hospital with an expert hand surgeon on staff, and the hand of the lady in question looks nearly the same. The "cheapest ER near her" would likely have stitched up a stump. Functional, but inferior. Furthermore, the standard of care becomes much more important with anything life-threatening.
https://oshpd.ca.gov/data-and-reports/cost-transparency/hosp...
https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/hospital-annual-financial-d...
> Emergency Room Visit, Level 2 (low to moderate severity) $1,185.00
> Emergency Room Visit, Level 3 (moderate severity) $2,105.00
> Emergency Room Visit, Level 4 (high severity without signigicant threat) $3,263.00
> Emergency Room Visit, Level 4 (high severity with significant threat) $5,009.00
I guess that's the very minimum base price, quite offensive for an european like me.
Health care is a basic human right.
We had an incident where a hospital here tried to charge an illegal for giving birth. It was an uproar in the news for weeks and the bill was dropped and hospital fined.
[1] https://github.com/docgraph/Hospital_Charge_Master_Data_Sche...
These lists are useless. God knows how many of those charges will they tack on your appendectomy, from unwrapping the syringe to administering the $4 pain killer.
What we need is is a simple list like some surgery centers have. This operation will cost this much and includes everything.
You're certainly right about needing total costs.
Just had a CT done a couple weeks ago for abdomenal pain, $750 without contrast according to the sheet (if I did not have insurance).
I looked into costs for past procedures I had done in high school. I had kidney stones at 16. Lithotripsy was required which alone would have cost ~$65k according to the sheets. Tallying up the other minor stuff like meds and facility fees would have brought me close to $100k.
Now you argue, 'well insurance pays less'. Of course they do. But I had experience in my mid-20's having to use hospital services without insurance. Rabies shots came to around $17k billed, I paid around $2k, and spent a year fighting to have my credit brought back to normal (hospital never applied a payment from a CDC program then reported me to collections).
Am I understanding something wrong or what ? Rabies vaccinations are something about $10 in India. I knew prices are up in US but this seems another level.
I had immunoglobin, which is given if you have been exposed to rabies vector without being vacinnated beforehand. This is where the money is as it's made from modified human cells. I would guess this would still run a couple thousand even in India.