Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

You can get a price upfront in my experience. Especially for standard procedures. And definitely for outpatient stuff.

But it isn't reasonable to expect upfront pricing in things as complicated as heart surgery. Or where you are going in for unknown problems. There is no way to know what complications may arise or additional procedures, x-rays or scans may be required.

View on HN

I was having trouble sleeping for a while; at one point my doctor recommending I go on oxygen for a while until she could figure it out. I called the company that provided the oxygen, and asked how much it would cost. Nobody knew. I called back 3 times, and still nobody could tell me. I called my insurance company; they couldn't tell me either. I ended up electing not to use it (which turned out to be perfectly fine), but it does seem like this was a fairly standard procedure, for outpatient stuff, and nobody involved knew what the prices were.

That matches my experience. Or you get quoted $100 and charged $3000 which after some back and forth turns into $50.

As someone who used to work in the medical field it can be a pain to even know how much insurances will reimburse for procedures. Especially when it comes to smaller / union insurance providers, health care providers have to call and wait for a fax or snail mail for a reimbursement table. This leads to balance billing or the provider just eating the cost.

On the consumer side I just found out about healthcare blue book and they have prices for just about any procedure.

When I had an HSA I called doctors to get estimates and only rarely got one. The only exception is dentists. They have pretty good price lists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com