When my doctor suggested an ultrasound for the pelvic pain I was experiencing, my first question was “How much will that cost?” I am one of the many Americans with a high-deductible health care plan — $10,000 to be exact. I often scoff that my health insurance is a “get-in-a-doctor’s-door-plan,” because I pay cash for basically everything anyway.
My doctor, recalling my poor insurance, asked, “Do you ever get to the other side of the state?” I looked at her quizzically. “Because there’s an imaging service over there that offers ultrasounds for …” She paused and searched her computer. “Let’s see … $137, maybe closer to $300 if they think you need both abdominal and transvaginal. But it’s like a two-hour drive.”
My eyes bulged out of my head. I was billed more than $1,000 for the last ultrasound I’d had at my local hospital years earlier.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
I was relieved that my doctor told me about the discounted service. If I’d had to pay $1,000 or more out of pocket then I would have put off the procedure, like so many Americans do (and that’s if I ever got it at all). I had no idea that health care service costs could vary so wildly.
Not only do prices vary from place to place, but the amount a patient will pay for the same service within the same hospital can vary depending on whether a patient has health insurance and what health insurance plan a patient has. When I called my local hospital to compare their prices for the ultrasound, I was told that it would cost around $700 with my insurance. If I were uninsured, that price would go up to almost $1,200. Meanwhile, that $137 option was a two-hour drive away — I just had to know where to look.
People looking for a car are told to shop around, maybe get a used car, or borrow one from a friend. Too often that same ethos is pushed into the health care space, with patients told to look around for the best deal or negotiate prices with providers. But price shopping for health care services is not as straight-forward as price shopping for a vehicle, despite legislative attempts to solve the problem.
At the beginning of the year, a new rule went into effect that requires hospitals to post their list prices online. But, as Kaiser Health News points out, that kind of transparency won’t have much of an impact because patients can’t understand those prices. The lists are full of incomprehensible abbreviations, list services separately that would always be bundled together, and vary depending on a person’s specific health plan, so consumers cannot get the type of information they need for comparison shopping. Moreover, these are just the list prices charged by hospitals; they do not include the price of physicians’ services during the hospital stay.
Not everyone has a doctor like mine, who actively looked out for my financial interests. And many times, even when people do try to calculate costs ahead of time, the tools they’re given turn out to be wildly inaccurate. One person profiled by the Philadelphia Inquirer, who proactively used her insurer’s price estimator tool to calculate the out-of-pocket cost of a breast MRI, was shocked when she was billed more than twice what the tool had suggested would be the upper-end range of out-of-pocket costs for the procedure.
Plus, finding the cheapest care is just the first hurdle.
My ability to access more affordable diagnostic services depended on a lot of things aligning — I had to have flexibility in my schedule to drive to a discounted imaging service provider, and I needed a vehicle that could make the trip. When all of those things did happen, I still had to shuffle work deadlines, time the appointment so that the drive there and back didn’t conflict with my kids’ school drop-off, and arrange for after-school care for them.
That same flexibility simply isn’t possible for everyone. Nearly 1 in 5 workers experience unstable work hours, which makes it impossible to schedule time to head to a different health provider in order to take advantage of cheaper care. Also, around 9 percent of Americans don’t own a car, and in recent years the number of people obtaining driver’s licenses has been trending downward. In rural areas, the nearest health care provider could be hours away. Though I live in an urban area, the nearest discounted service provider was a two-hour drive.
In an emergency, no one has time to inquire about costs. And even in less urgent situations, there is often no way to accurately determine prices. While hospitals are now required to post their price lists online, health care isn’t Amazon, where items are easily searched for, compared, and where prices are fixed. And high-deductible insurance plans are increasing in number, including in employer-sponsored plans, as insurers attempt to cost-shift onto consumers. That means more people are going to be in the same place I was over time.
On my drive to the other side of the state, I considered how fortunate I was to be able to access discounted health services. But being a self-employed person with a vehicle should not provide me with more options than someone with a less flexible work schedule or doesn’t have a car. No one should have to waste precious time searching aimlessly for the best deal for treatment, and no one should have to go without because they didn’t know it was more affordable elsewhere or because the more affordable location was not accessible.
Until the U.S. chooses to recognize health care as a human right rather than a commodity or entitlement, the poorest Americans will continue to suffer.
About the author: Kathi Valeii is a journalist and essayist in Michigan.
This article was published by TalkPoverty.org.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment