The congressional omnibus spending bill passed in the final days of 2020 included—finally—the President's objective of compelling hospitals to publish their REAL prices for all Healthcare consumers to see for the first time.

Now the question becomes:  Where to find it?

Will we all begin picking our way through every local hospital website? Will our insurance carriers help us with concise "pricing guides"? Will we all be now able to price-shop, compare, and find the best deal?

Here is an article shared by National Public Radio (NPR) from the Healthcare information resource Becker's Hospital Review listing 70 Medicare-Mandated Services hospitals must include in the price-publishing the new law calls for. This is a particularly helpful list as it includes both easily-recognizable descriptions as well as the industry codes, known as CPT codes, for each description. 

As we've blogged previously, it's difficult to marshal this type of information on the fly, as when you're being wheeled into the Emergency Department on a gurney, or even by your loved ones when they're in a panic over how you are, or in the present time of Covid, when they mostly can't even get to you in there.

So, not to be fickle, but how do we all benefit from this new Price Transparency? Well, according to NPR, "...Employers may have a keen interest." That is because employers who provide a Health Plan have both a fiduciary responsibility as well as a financial one:

Fiduciary—because all good companies already see it as one of their mandates to help their workers with information on such vital considerations as medical cost savings. 

Financial—because many, many employers—medium as well as large companies—are self-insured. They may have an Aetna, Blue Cross or United Healthcare on board as plan administrators, but they actually FUND their own plans. Even if they don't, most companies bear the costs of subsidizing some of employee coverage, so their competitive advantage on negotiating rates is affected by claims and dollars paid to providers.

DOC$ is organized around the mission of providing an easily navigated, one-stop-shopping resource for BOTH companies AND individual consumers. We will be aggressively gathering the published data from hospitals mandated by the new law. We will organize this information into COMPARATIVE GRIDS so companies and their workers can price shop. We will go further by contacting Imaging Centers, Minor Medical and Surgery Centers, as well as Physical Therapy clinics and others, so that useful information can be at everyone's fingertips.

And as always, everyone is invited to use our on-site forms to anonymously report your own purchases.

Now is the time. Here is the place. It's a new day of Healthcare Price Transparency that will translate to significant savings. For Real. The next steps are up to us—all. It's in our hands now.

Know the Cost of Healthcare BEFORE You Go In!