Healthcare consumerism is a term being used to describe people who make the effort to shop for healthcare. We all know what consumerism means when we’re shopping for cars: go online and read reports about the type of car we’re looking for so we can compare features, quality ratings and buyer reviews; compare prices, and then before we head to the dealer, find out what the wholesale price for the car is. What consumerism has done for car shopping is to build a base of educated consumers who know what they want and how much to pay for it.
In healthcare, pricing isn’t transparent. It’s true you can sometimes go on your insurance carrier’s website and find out what their negotiated price is for a procedure, doctor’s visit or test, but often this is after the fact and you have the right codes. So much of health monitoring and treatment happens in the moment that it isn’t easy to get a definitive price for anything. But this shouldn’t stop us from trying, and then reviewing the services and the cost to let others know if we think we got value or not. On our website myhealthandmoney.com we’ve built a comparative price feature so you can look up ahead of time what a test or procedure might cost you. This is for educational purposes because until you’ve had a procedure and found out what your insurance has negotiated you won’t know the actual price. But we think it’s better to have an understanding upfront what the average variation in pricing looks like by facility. This can also be used for negotiating purposes if you have an HSA and are paying the whole amount against your deductible.
Media outlets also have taken to healthcare consumerism by trying to educate the public about costs. Sometimes, however, this effort is misguided because the story is more complex than what you see at first blush. For instance, the other day in the paper I saw outcomes data for certain procedures at specific local hospitals. Medical outcomes data is another way to measure quality besides price and our own value rating. The only problem is that outcomes data is often taken out of context. For instance, a very good hospital rated very low on cardiac cases. To someone who doesn’t know how to read data, it would look like this hospital killed most of its patients. The truth is that this particular facility gets the very worst cases, which means they have a higher rate of deaths/cardiac case than another hospital that sees fewer, healthier cardiac patients.
I’m firmly behind the healthcare consumerism movement. We can only empower ourselves if we’re willing to make the effort to become educated and have a voice about what is truly affordable pricing. I hear a lot of talk about letting the market fix the healthcare problem, but we need to remember that includes the people buying the goods and services
I was heading south on interest 95 in Connecticut when the traffic stopped abruptly. I slammed on my breaks and almost hit the person in front of me but thankfully avoided it. Sadly the person behind was following way too close and hit my 2011 Ford Focus with his old beat up Toyota Corolla. We exchanged insurance information and I thought everything was going to be fine but a few days later I noticed that I was experiencing pain from a whiplash injury and it does not look like his insurance company wants to pay. Is there anything that I can do? Should I be able to an auto accident settlement?