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A comment on If you imagine a business making surgical facemasks is working 24/7, guess again. Parent comment

Re:If you imagine a business making surgical facemasks is wo... by stale2002 on Monday April 06, 2020 @05:01AM (#22791968)
> It's literally impossible to comparison shop healthcare, and I've tried.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:If you imagine a business making surgical facemasks is wo... by iguy on Monday April 06, 2020 @06:30AM (#22792387)
Something like this would be great. And the posted prices ought to include all complications / unexpected weird things -- they have the information (and the volume) to average such costs, you don't.

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)?

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Re:If you imagine a business making surgical facemasks is wo... by BurningFrog on Monday April 06, 2020 @11:02AM (#22794338)
There are places actually doing this today: https://medium.com/@russroberts/health-care-lessons-from-dr-...

If you have time to listen to the podcast, it can be very eyeopening.

[ Parent | on HN ]