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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a great opportunity for a company to invest serious time and money into creating a better-centralized database which will allow people to decipher and compare prices. It sounds like a highly-complicated task, but if someone can pull it off, that would be huge.

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The opportunity is likely more B2B than B2C, where insurers are more apt to negotiate down prices if they see they are "overpaying" based on comps.

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.

who would you sell to - provider or payer? Payers should already be comparing across the providers they service. Providers would definitely find value - the challenge here is comparison based on list price are not inherently useful, yet obtaining negotiated prices would be difficult. I'm all ears for partnering if someone can get access to negotiated prices, even for a specific region.

> 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.)

As a non American, based on what I've heard of the US system, I would absolutely ask about price for any medical treatment in the US if I was still physically capable of asking.

Haven't broken a leg, so can't be sure whether I'd be functional - probably depends on how bad the break is :D

Looking at comments from last week here on HN it seems to be _very_ common that the prices quoted are a fraction of what you then end up getting billed.

How that can be legal, I don't know.

You can try, but the answer is likely to be “we don’t know, ask the billing department afterwards”.

Ha, yeah, I can imagine :-/

Insurers already do this.

Why on earth should a person have to compare prices between hospitals?

Directly paying for a hospital to the point of service is an alien enough concept to most of the civilized world, this is a minor step forward at least.

It's marginally better than getting surprised by questionable bills afterwards.

Because hospitals vary widely in pricing, people often get stuck with part of the bill, and if it's not an emergency you've got time to comparison shop.

(But if you're asking "why do we have such a crazy healthcare system," I have no answer.)

An unaffiliated group with plenty of cash could also incentivize individuals to submit records, and automate the process of requesting records

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