Making Hospital Prices Matter

hospital-prices-vary-wildly-bar-graphI recently learned about a company called OpsCost, which has a very user-friendly website designed to help people figure out how much different hospitals charge for a wide range of treatments and procedures. The company makes use of the data that the Medicare program has recently made available to the general public, and then presents those data more elegantly than many other sites I have seen. You can go here to look at the company website, and you will quickly find yourself looking up prices for hospitals in your region.  (Disclosure: I have not received any money from any price transparency companies, nor entered into any business relationships.)
For example, I told the website that I wanted to look at hospital prices near Durham, North Carolina, for “Hip & Femur Procedures Except Major Joint Without Complications And Comorbities/Major Complications And Comorbities,” and the program showed me a list of hospitals and prices, with a Google map on the right-hand side showing where each hospital was located. Pretty nifty. But is it useful? …(Read more and view comments at Forbes)

PeterUbel