comparison shop for health savings

Patients get new tools to price health care
Pittsburgh Post Gazette - Pittsburgh,PA,USA
... That information was posted online in early June, at hospitalpricing.sd.gov ... prices at individual pharmacies for the 50 most-commonly used prescription drugs in ...

Consumers are finally getting some of the tools they need to comparison-shop for health care the way they do for cars or personal computers, though it's too early to tell whether people will use these new services.

Aetna Inc., which last year in the Cincinnati area became the first major insurer to reveal rates it negotiates with local physicians, is expanding that program to eight more areas. Other major insurers, including Cigna Corp., Humana Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc., are adding or expanding their own online pricing tools. And Medicare early this month posted online the ranges of what it pays hospitals for 30 common procedures and treatments, the first in a series of disclosures the agency says it will make. Several state governments and hospital associations, including in Florida, New Hampshire, Utah and New Mexico, are launching Web services that list hospital charges.

The information provided by these new tools comes with caveats, but the services do show that, in principle at least, comparison shopping can make a difference: While prices of simple services in doctors' offices are fairly consistent according to some online data, hospital costs often vary widely. For example, a Web-based pricing tool offered by Humana shows that at hospitals in a Humana network in southeast Wisconsin, a knee replacement ranges from a minimum of $16,900 at one hospital to a maximum of $34,050 at another, reflecting in part discounted rates that the insurer has negotiated with health-care providers.
The new pricing services are popping up as consumers are being asked to shoulder an ever-greater proportion of their health-care costs. Employer-sponsored and other health plans are shifting more of the cost of health care to consumers by raising co-payments and cutting benefits. That dovetails with efforts by the Bush administration to promote so-called consumer-driven health care, mainly through high-deductible insurance policies paired with health savings accounts that offer financial incentives to shop wisely for care.
link 2 link