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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

> Does such a thing exist? [...] I think millions of US citizens would subscribe.

Yes, such thing exists.

My friend just had an endoscopy & colonoscopy together. She was able to get a price estimate through her hospital's portal both with and without her insurance, prior to her procedures, requiring no special interaction besides picking the service she was interested in and if she wanted to see the price with or without insurance.

The system seem to show her anything and everything she needed, from a routine office visit, these procedures, to delivering a baby. It not only includes the price at that facility but also a range from low to high, and where the facility fits. It also gives breakdown of the fees, although not deep enough.

The service seems to be by a company called Epic (www.epic.com), based in Wisconsin.

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> The service seems to be by a company called Epic (www.epic.com), based in Wisconsin.

Lol, that mom and pop shop.

That’s the largest EMR vendor in North America and second in the world.

They’re the provider of the patient portal frontend amongst other things but there’s a lot more behind the scenes that must be done (with varying levels of quality) that is institution specific. Just using Epic does not make this work.

Exactly. IF you're a hospital system paying 10's of millions of dollars annually to Epic, and IF you want to pay for Epic's price estimation tool and offer it to consumers, then, yes, your patients can get a rough estimate of the cost of their elective surgery.

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Most of my graduating high school class works for Epic. Their campus rivals Google's. Fun fact, they bought all the farm land you can see to the horizon and rented it back to the farmers for below market rates just to ensure the view from their campus was unobstructed by new development.

If you think anything about Epic is free or in the patient's best interest, check out their auditorium: https://cuningham.com/portfolio/epic-deep-space-auditorium You could host a Taylor Swift concert in there and have unused seating.

Putting aside the systemic critiques, I really dig the design of that building and its surroundings. That auditorium even puts Apple's to shame.

And apparently they have so many employees the auditorium isn’t big enough anymore so there’s some spillover for all staff meetings

> You could host a Taylor Swift concert in there and have unused seating.

Taylor Swift regularly sells out venues with capacity of 70k+ (football stadiums), it's doubtful she would even consider an 11k venue unless it was a private event.

> a company called Epic

Epic is the biggest provider of hospital information systems in the US by market share. The hospital was probably using their software.

Most colonoscopies are covered as preventive care with no cost to the patient.

https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/

Except providers still send patients bills for them and just hope a few of them pay rather than fight it.

From your own link that seems to be only for marketplace plans and maybe select private ones, only applies for scopes done for colorectal cancer screenings specifically (not for any other conditions or risks), and even then only for adults 45 to 75.

So I would say your statement is extremely disingenuous to say the least.

It generally applies to all commercial medical insurance plans regulated under that Affordable Care Act. Most clinical care guidelines only justify colonoscopies for patients within that age range unless they have unusual risk factors; outside that range the risks and costs outweigh the benefits. Colorectal cancer is very rare before age 45. The procedure itself carries a small risk of bowel perforation, as well as side effects from sedation.

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