MRI avg price is $2,611 in the US. Google it. A hospital once charged my insurance US$12,000 for a CT Scan through emergency. A CT scan costs $1K (avg based on resolution) in the US. When I pointed out the stupidity of this to my insurance (with public twitter shaming) they quickly decided to cover my copay. Robbery or what?
Any ideas on how to fix the healthcare market? The feedback loops seem to be totally broken, in more than one place. I've long wondered how they could be restored, short of government action to try to make things drastically more efficient. Unfortunately, there seem to be strong incentives for officials not to do anything, given that that inefficiency means that healthcare is a major, growing, and well distributed employer.
Improved price transparency might help, and would be a relatively easy thing to improve, but with most patients not being responsible for paying their own costs, I'm not very optimistic about that route.
"but with most patients not being responsible for paying" -- right there lays the answer and the problem. I thought about this a lot while doing my 1st healthcare startup in silicon valley and connected with many startups "disrupting healthcare through price transparency". 5 years later... None succeeded.
If one could incentivize every patient to upload their bills to an open source service that would crunch the data and spit it out anonymously online showcasing hospitals & services rendered + insurers et al.. then I think we might be on our way to true price transparency and a potential disruption in US healthcare.
I spent some time thinking about ways to incentivize patients to upload bills, you'd only need a very small fraction to get a representative sample of how much different services cost at different hospitals. I haven't come up with anything very motivating, except maybe the desire to expose how ridiculous some of them are.
