Turquoise Health

Whether you have insurance or plan to pay cash - find and compare prices...

 Health care price transparency: Fool’s gold, or real money in your pocket?

While it is easy to blame greedy pharmaceutical manufacturers, health insurers and hospital executives, the problem comes from the very nature of our confused system. Who actually benefits from these high prices and why do they persist? Is it just greed, or something endemic in the system?

 Only 14% of Hospitals Met Price Transparency Rule Compliance

One year after the hospital price transparency rule went into effect, 85 percent of hospitals are still not complying with the federal requirements to publicly post prices for services.

The New Year Will Bring More Transparency In Hospital Prices

A new federal health care rule will require hospitals to publicly post prices for every service they offer and break down those prices by component and procedure. The idea behind the Transparency in Coverage rule is to let patients choose where to go, taking price into consideration.

You can now look up charges at your local hospital. Good luck understanding them.

Making that data available means doing a lot more than posting charge lists. It means making public the millions of prices that hospitals and insurers currently negotiate in secret. That’s the data patients really need to understand how much their trip to the hospital will cost — but right now, that’s the data that patients still don’t have access to.

Hospital Care Prices Rose Faster Than the Cost of Physician Services

Growth in hospital prices, not physician payments, is largely responsible for rising costs for inpatient and hospital-based outpatient care.

Hospital price growth driving healthcare spending

Hospital prices are the main driver of U.S. healthcare spending inflation, and that trend should direct any policy changes going forward, according to a new study.

Hospitals keep ER fees secret. We’re uncovering them

Reporter Sarah Kliff is collecting emergency room bills as part of a year-long project focused on American health care prices.

How Much Does a C-Section Cost? At One Hospital, Anywhere From $6,241 to $60,584

New federally mandated disclosures by California’s Sutter Health illustrate the wide disparity in healthcare rates negotiated by insurers.

Who’s Profiting From Your Outrageous Medical Bills?

The same people who should be fixing them.

Why I’m Obsessed With Patients’ Medical Bills

To report on the true cost of health care, it’s critical to see what a hospital charges patients. But since hospitals keep those prices a secret, I turn to the next best source: you.

A CT scan costs $1,100 in the US — and $140 in Holland

America’s health care prices problem, in four charts.

Americans have the right to know their health care and hospital costs

While the work we have done to empower patients by increasing transparency is making great strides, we are just getting started as we work to increase price and quality transparency throughout the health care system.

Behind Your Rising Health-Care Bills: Secret Hospital Deals That Squelch Competition

Contracts with insurers allow hospitals to hide prices from consumers, add fees and discourage use of less-expensive rivals.

How hospitals could kill the health insurance industry

When and if the bean counters figure out a way that hospitals can do better without the private insurers around, it's hard to see why they wouldn't simply sweep them away faster than Amazon put an end to your local book store.

Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much

Hospitals have learned to manipulate medical codes — often resulting in mind-boggling bills.

What the Trump administration gets right about hospital price transparency

To help consumers make apples-to-apples comparisons, hospitals will be required to go beyond the individual codes and post their negotiated rates for a list of 300 so-called “shoppable” services that consumers might examine before selecting a provider. This requires hospitals to link services that usually accompany each other, such as laboratory and pathology charges along with surgery.

Hospitals and Insurers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why

And it provides numerous examples of major health insurers — some of the world’s largest companies, with billions in annual profits — negotiating surprisingly unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than they would if they pretended to have no coverage at all.

Health insurers are now required to post prices they pay to hospitals

The federal government says insurers must publicly post the amounts they pay hospitals and doctors. It's another step toward price transparency in the country's complicated health care system.

Hospital Price Transparency

Hospital price transparency helps Americans know the cost of a hospital item or service before receiving it. Starting January 1, 2021, each hospital operating in the United States will be required to provide clear, accessible pricing information online about the items and services they provide in two ways:

A New Item on Your Medical Bill: The ‘Covid’ Fee

A surprise charge that can take advantage of vulnerable people and possibly violate consumer protection laws.

Average cost of hospital care for COVID-19 ranges from $51,000 to $78,000, based on age

When one factors in length of stay, the average hospital charge increased the longer patients were there, and they continued to vary by age group.

Hospital Billing

Spending time in the hospital is very expensive. Rather than giving you an itemized list of everything that might go into a hospital stay, I’ll talk about something that should be almost as good: bills from a hospital, complete with final payments. That should give us a pretty good idea of the value of hospital services, since insurance companies have access to all the costs and specialize in being able to offer the minimum amount any institution is likely to accept.