Indeed this is true.
The solution to this, though, is to make it required for hospitals to post their prices, as well as to make it illegal for hospitals to give preferential rates to insurance deals.
But not trivial to implement correctly. What exactly is the menu of procedures, and who standardizes (and updates) it? It would be much harder to comparison shop if there were a million entries (and every hospital offers a subset). Can hospitals select their patients, e.g. post great prices & outcomes by only accepting patients under 50 (or just with few other health issues)?
If you have time to listen to the podcast, it can be very eyeopening.
Huh?
The question I answered was about "people who are literally passed out and bleeding out on stretchers to price shop"
I agree that medical billing is a corrupt disaster.
If they can do it, why the fuck can't doctors do the same? The system is so obviously rotten.
It took years to find that almost every facility nearby does the tests he orders for no copay at all. But Beth-Israel doesn't see a problem with charging literally over a hundred dollars after insurance for a blood draw.
I guess a very big and very evil problem for another time, but our health care system is a house of cards.
> Because that would be the worst imaginable PR.
You're wrong. "Bad PR" has not worked at all to encourage the healthcare industry to fix medical billing on its own. See this article for an example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/magazine/those-indecipher...
It's literally impossible to comparison shop healthcare, and I've tried. You can't properly diagnose yourself, for the same reason a doctor can't properly debug your code. You have no idea how treatment is going to be coded (and you'd have to be an expert to understand the codes and their implications, anyway). Hospitals will only tell you their inflated "list prices." Your insurance won't tell you anything about what they've negotiated with the hospitals in your area until you've been billed, since they consider that information proprietary.
Most healthcare is to solve real health problems (from mild to extremely serious). People won't decide to live with those problems unless they're forced to, so they can't opt out of the system until it's fixed.