Summary: Our partners at WHYY public radio in the Delaware Valley (Philadelphia) have been getting some emails from listeners who are interested in our project to bring transparency to health care pricing. One came from Don Greenfield, who had an eye-opening experience looking at his wife’s medical bills about a year ago. Click through for details, or …
We just launched our WHYY’s PriceCheck project in Philadelphia, with WHYY The Pulse, the health and science wing of the WHYY NewsWorks team. Here’s the page with our crowdsourcing widget (share prices! search prices!) and here’s the page with some of our continuing coverage.
Greenfield is a funny guy.
“I went to my insurance company’s website and looked at the explanation of benefits and my eyes opened up and my jaw dropped,” he told WHYY. “It was just an excruciating level of detail.”
There was the operating room, recovery room, the room and board, pharmacy, medical supplies and so on, he says.
“So this got Greenfield thinking, ‘what if restaurants billed like hospitals?’ Here’s what he came up with,” wrote Megan Pinto of the WHYY staff.
I like everything — but especially the crockery and cutlery usage. Also the 8 cents for the salt.
The piece was picked up and retweeted several places, including TheHealthCareBlog and Food and Wine.
