Should Your Doctor Talk With You About the Cost of Your Pills?
In the last few decades, medical schools have been teaching us doctors to inform patients about their treatment alternatives, so our patients can pick the alternative that best fits with their...
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Are Insurance Companies the Key to Lower Prices?
Two patients lie asleep on operating room tables, each with an inflamed appendix demanding to be relocated to a specimen jar. Two operations take place, each one lasting close to fifty minutes, each...
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One Price Does Not Fit All for Medical Fees
In the New York Times on Friday, Roni Caryn Rabin writes a great article about the crazy price hikes that hospitals and medical clinics impose upon patients who come to them from “out of the network.”...
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Price Transparency at its WORST
You may have heard this week about a new study, led by my friend and colleague Pete Cram, which revealed astonishing variation in prices for hip replacement surgery. Staggering, actually—ranging from a...
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How Price Transparency Could End Up Increasing Health-Care Costs
Getting your appendix out can cost between $2,000 and $180,000. Hip replacements run from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Hospitals, we have also learned, frequently mark up the price of cotton swabs...
View ArticleThe Price Transparency Debate Continues
As you know from a couple of my earlier posts, I am exploring the ins and outs of price transparency in health care. Here is a nice post by William Pierce in the Huffington Post that pulls together a...
View ArticleArticle on Price Transparency in the Duke Chronicle
Here is a nice piece in the Chronicle, the student newspaper at Duke, on price transparency in medical care. You know when UNDERGRADS start writing about a topic, it is hot! (Click here to view comments)
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Hospital Pricing Insanity
Once again, lots of reports in the news about crazy variation in hospital prices in the United States, with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars difference in the price of services from one...
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Will Obamacare Reduce the Crazy Variation in Hospital Prices?
If you have been paying attention to US healthcare policy debates lately, you know that hospitals have a price problem. Walk across the street from one hospital to a competitor hospital, and you could...
View ArticleExpanding the Role of Non-Physicians in Primary Care
I’m back to blogging again, and thought I’d return to a topic I have blogged about recently: expanding the role of non-physicians in primary care. A very talented journalist in North Carolina, Jason...
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Should We Care About Hospital Prices?
I have been writing quite a bit about healthcare price transparency lately. And so have a lot of other people. Many of us have been pointing to insane variation in how much hospitals charge for their...
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Procedures and Prices: Both Contribute to Health Care Spending Increases
For very good reason, there has been lots of attention on healthcare prices in the United States lately. We spend more on healthcare in this country than anywhere else in the world, and we also charge...
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Surgery Prices Online?
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma’s decision to publicly post prices for common procedures could prompt other hospitals and medical facilities to follow suit. Want to know how much it will cost to repair...
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State Mandates Online Health Care Price
The hospital price transparency bill that was signed into effect on August 21 has elicited criticism from the Duke health community. House Bill 834 mandates that hospitals and medical care agencies in...
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Warning to Orthopedic Hospitals: Your Fees Are No Match for Reference Pricing
Until recently, hospitals in California had little reason to reduce the fees they charged for procedures like knee and hip replacement. Insurance companies might come their way, trying hard to bargain...
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Debate Rages Over Obamacare, Medical Costs
When Dr. Jeffrey Rice needed to schedule outpatient foot surgery for his son three years ago, he called the recommended facility to find out what it would cost. The estimate was so high — $15,000 to...
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Making Hospital Prices Matter
I recently learned about a company called OpsCost, which has a very user-friendly website designed to help people figure out how much different hospitals charge for a wide range of treatments and...
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Orthopedic Surgeons Get “F” Grade On Knowing Cost Of The Devices They Implant
A new study asks Orthopedic surgeons to guess the price of the devices they implant – “the amount your institution currently pays the vendor for the implant.” Despite a lenient grading system, in...
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Financial Counseling for Cancer Patients: A Growth Industry?
A former student of mine who now works at the Advisory Board recently emailed me some figures her company put together, offering a snapshot of how many people are being hired in oncology practices to...
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Price Transparency Thoughts from a Thought Leader (And Former Student)
Here is a great piece on my former student, Jessica Harris, who now works in health care price transparency at Aetna. She visited my class this summer, and here are some of the things she taught them:...
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