Me and a friend were talking that idea a few weeks ago. You'd need to further include what insurance plan that consumer was on as well, so know what the hospital would charge knowing that information.
Crowdsourcing it would make it significantly more transparent, but the problem (to me, at least) is more that submitting that information somewhere is more of a privacy/HIPAA thing than most consumers and companies are willing to handle.
I could definitely envision a government system, like medicare, would hire people to do this, and make the prices more transparent to consumers, but this is the same medicare whose part D cannot negotiate drug prices due to lobbying efforts.
Re:Thoughts on Insurance
by dreamcompiler on Thursday June 29, 2017 @09:01PM
(#14667999)
Hey, the hospitals could even hire actuaries to statistically analyze costs and charge everybody the expected average.
We could call that...oh wait. Nevermind.
I assume you didn't watch the video and therefore didn't understand the point.
I'd imagine the reasons for the complexity are the same as an injury.
Edit: Just a thought...
What if enough consumers went line-by-line AFTER the fact and shared what the specific breakdown of every item cost? So then you'd be able to say, okay, at this hospital them giving us an Advil cost $X and them doing this procedure cost $Y.
Some way of making the master price list for how much individual items cost public and grouping together ones that generally appear together...