Week 12: Consumers Advocating for Transparency in Health-Care Costs

Commerce in America is a frustrating issue.  The majority of the American population has to carefully balance what they make with what they spend and save.  This means carefully analyzing what we spend on what we purchase by researching prices, especially on the larger items that we buy, like homes or vehicles.  Researching prices for those larger items is becoming easier with technology.  With the advent of smart phones, there are even apps now that make it easy to research these big-ticket item prices on the go.  However, one of the biggest-ticket items in the United States is health care.  But, what can American’s do to assuage anxiety over health-care spending?  How can we research health care costs in order to be prepared to incorporate them into the act of balancing what we make with what we spend and save?  I’ve never been able to find clear answers to these questions.

My second pregnancy resulted in my becoming a mother for both the second and the third time.  Those gorgeous twin babies were born premature and what followed was one of the scariest and most anxious three weeks of my life as my babies were cared for in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) before they were able to sustain life on their own and allowed to come home.  I’m not sure that the meaning of that last sentence is clearly stated enough; what I’m saying is that without the present advanced medical technology, which, in the grand scheme of history, came into being not at all that long ago, my babies (whom I am blissfully listening to run around in our backyard, playing in the beautiful sunshine) would not be here today.  I was at the mercy of the health care system.

A few months later, my husband and I received an itemized list of costs incurred during those three weeks.  The cost of that NICU stay for my daughter Mia, which was two weeks, was just over $56,000.  The cost of my daughter Eva’s three week long NICU stay was just over $75,000.  Thankfully, those costs then went through negotiations with our health care provider and after that only a small portion of that cost was assigned to us for payment.

However, the shock of those figures got me thinking.  How would I have known what to expect prior to any of those services.  I couldn’t even understand half of what was included in that list of itemized figures.  Since then, the whole idea of the cost of being cared for medically being a grab-bag type of surprise, where no two people, as far as I can tell, get the same amount billed for parallel care, has become a larger and larger anxiety for me.

A few years ago, I ran across this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tct38KwROdw) on YouTube and it really struck me how this really should be a larger issue for consumers in America.  The creator of this video really hit the nail right on the head.  We need transparency in health-care pricing so that the consumers know relatively what to expect and might even be able to shop for more affordable health care.  In recent year, there has been a push for more transparency in health care costs, but I think, as consumers, we should be demanding more.  If more consumers made hospitals and doctor’s offices aware of the fact that they sought that information prior to seeking care, it may motivate change.  If billing departments had to field calls all day with questions that they’re not able to answer, maybe those in authority would be more motivated to make those answers attainable.  So next time you go to the doctor’s office, think about giving them a call before you head over, just to ask if they have an estimate about roughly how much your visit will end up costing.

Work Cited:

Cervantes, Rodrigo. “Giving birth costs a lot. Hospitals won't tell you how much.” YouTube. Vox, 5 May 2016.