Real Patients Need Real Prices

By
Alex Faubel
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0
993

With consumerism in healthcare on the rise and an increased focus on price transparency for health costs, our industry is looking at patients more and more as consumers. There are two real problems with that, one being that the way patients shop for health services is completely different than the way they shop for goods and the other being that each and every patient has their own unique situation based on their needs, their location and their coverage. Due to these factors, we are required to look at patients as people rather than consumers.
Some patients struggle to identify themselves as consumers in the health care shopping process, whether it is out of confusion, frustration or disinterest. Changes brought about by The Affordable Care Act however, have led people to take a more active role in comparing and selecting their care providers. With prices varying so much from state-to-state, city-to-city and even provider-to-provider however, it becomes seriously challenging for patients to know what is fair in terms of costs for procedures.
Our goal is to help reach out to real people so they can find real costs, not just estimates. When patients are relying solely on guesses to what their total will be versus a true price, they can end up with steep bills in the thousand-dollar range. No one likes those. Scouring the Twitter-sphere, trying to gain some real insight on how patients are reacting to health care costs, we realized a surprising amount of people using the social media forum as a sounding board to air their grievances with health costs. So we thought, we might as well answer their questions!


https://twitter.com/ahshiqs/status/483579461565042688


https://twitter.com/Shaowei_pororo/status/482082863446122497

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