Our partner Lee Zurik gave a great interview on Harry Shearer’s popular nationwide radio show/podcast, “Le Show,” on Aug. 27. Listen here, as Zurik and Shearer discuss the significance of our “Cracking the Code” investigative work in New Orleans and nationwide.
Vogue magazine describes Le Show as a “wildly clever, iconoclastic stew of talk, music, political commentary, readings of inadvertently funny public documents or trade magazines and scripted skits.” The program made its debut in 1983 and is carried on many NPR and other public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and as podcasts on his website, on Audible.com and on iTunes.
If you don’t know Shearer, here’s a snippet from the bio on his show page: “He has enjoyed enormous success and planted the fruits of his talents in the heads of millions worldwide thanks to his voice work for THE SIMPSONS, where he plays a stable of characters: most notably Mr. Burns, Smithers, and insufferable neighbour Ned Flanders.
“Movie audiences will know Shearer best for his collaborations with Christopher Guest and friends. The most famous of these is the granddaddy of all mock-umentaries, THIS IS SPINAL TAP (with Rob Reiner and Michael McKean). … Other Guest collaborations have included, A MIGHTY WIND and FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION.
“Shearer’s other film credits include REAL LIFE, THE RIGHT STUFF, PORTRAIT OF A WHITE MARRIAGE, THE FISHER KING, GODZILLA, THE TRUMAN SHOW, SMALL SOLDIERS and DICK. He has been a regular cast member on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE twice and, in 2002, wrote and directed his first feature film, TEDDY BEARS’ PICNIC.. In 2010 Shearer wrote and directed THE BIG UNEASY, a documentary feature investigating Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.”
For more about our New Orleans “Cracking the Code” partnership, click here.
HOW YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE
DID YOU SAVE money with information from ClearHealthCosts or “Cracking the Code”? Tell us by email at info@clearhealthcosts.com or health@fox8live.com.
DO YOU HAVE PRICES to share to help build our community-created guide to health care? Or are you looking for price information?
Click over to our New Orleans PriceCheck interactive software at WVUE Fox 8 Live and at NOLA.com I The Times-Picayune. Search our prices in our New Orleans-focused partnership. For non-New Orleans shares and searches, here’s the search and share page on our national ClearHealthCosts site.
ARE YOU A PROVIDER wishing to share prices?
This page has a sample spreadsheet showing the data that will let us include your prices. Download, fill it out and return to us at info@clearhealthcosts.com or health@fox8live.com.
Email us with any questions.
To discuss a potential partnership, email us at partner@clearhealthcosts.com.
ABOUT OUR DATA AND OUR WORK
For news coverage, look here at WVUE FOX 8 Live and here at NOLA.com I The Times-Picayune.
The information in our database comes from several sources. First, our journalists conduct a direct survey of local providers to collect cash or self-pay prices for a range of 30-35 common, “shoppable” procedures. Through our interactive software tool, we encourage community members to add to the site by sharing their pricing information from bills or “explanation of benefits” statements. We also include data on the Medicare reimbursement rate, what the government pays for a procedure in a given area under the Medicare program for older Americans, since that’s the closest thing to a fixed or benchmark price in the marketplace. That figure is computed via a formula used to price 8,400 procedures in 90 separate geographical areas in the system used by the federal government.
More information about the entire data set can be found here. More information about medical codes can be found here.
More information about our nationwide partnerships is collected here.
Articles highlighting our data and our media partnerships have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and in JAMA Internal Medicine. We’ve also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, USA Today and elsewhere. To read more about our work and partnerships, visit our media page.
While we do not have every price for every procedure at every provider across the nation — that data does not exist anywhere — we do have a “community-created guide to health costs” where people can share and search health cost data, as well as explanation and interpretation of the data from our news partners.
To search or share your costs and experiences, click here.
