Medical Robbery

Previous posts have described the pernicious effects of having no transparency in medical pricing: no one knows what a procedure or service is going to cost. The patient is at the mercy of the billing clerk. Comparison shopping becomes impossible. Price gouging can hide behind a curtain.

A few states have made faint efforts to correct this situation. Some have passed laws requiring the creation of a public website where consumers can consult the prices for different services. However, follow-up and implementation has been pathetic. An organization called the Healthcare Incentives Improvement Institute has done a methodical comparison of efforts at transparency by different states. Following an explicit methodology, it gives each state a grade on transparency. The results in this year's report gives an A to no state, a B to only Maine and Massachusetts, a C to Colorado, Vermont, and Virginia, and an F to every other state! New Hampshire had the distinction of going from an A last year to an F this year because the website it developed to report medical pricing mysteriously ceased to function.

True healthcare reform will have occurred in this country when no state gets anything below a C. Until that happens all we can do is funnel more money from other purposes toward healthcare and fight over who will get how much of that money. But those other purposes, the other items in both personal and government budgets, cannot keep feeding the medical beast forever. The data in the last posting should convince us of that. The data in this posting should convince us our representatives are not taking the problem seriously (yet).