GoodRx Upends Healthcare Price Obfuscation

As Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal told NPR in 2017 (listen to or read the interview athttps://n.pr/2OgsDMt -- it was fascinating), Americans are told over and over again that they need to be  good consumers of healthcare services. But she explained that in order to be a good consumer, you need to know a price. Healthcare in the U.S. is one of the few markets in which no one can tell the consumer what the prices for their services actually are. (And she added " P.S., a lot of medicine isn ' t so elective. Your doctor says hey, you need to have your hip replaced. Or your doctor says, I ' m going to fill out a requisition for this blood test. Here ' s the lab I ' m sending it to. You don ' t really have a lot of choice " ).Dr. Rosenthal gave the example, if a doctor tells you that you need to get that your wrist X-rayed after you fall, you can call 10 different X-ray centers. But no one can tell you what the price for those services are. Instead, they ' re all going to tell you that " it depends on your insurance " or " we don ' t know " .That ' s the very definition of a failed marketplace. If lawmakers expect to reform it, there has to be a lot more transparency. But transparency alone won ' t fix it because so many entities involved have grown accustomed to collecting money they have not earned), but it needs to be there. Hidden or secret prices does not enable consumers to comparison shop or to be good consumers of healthcare services. In prescription drugs, the amount sp...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2021 GoodRx insulin Source Type: blogs