ClearHealthCosts
By Ian Chant Shopping for glasses or contacts? You’re in luck: they remain reasonably affordable (see table below), even for people without insurance, and it’s easy to shop around. While the cost of vision care through an employer can vary widely, individual vision care programs may make less sense than they once did. In New […]
Jeanne Pinder
Patients are terrible consumers, according to Jon Cohen, chief medical officer at Quest Diagnostics. In a video of his appearance at the June TedMed conference, he made these points: People with high-deductible plans and health savings accounts are saving money and not spending it on basic health care. Mammography rates, cervical cancer screening rates, colonoscopy […]
Jeanne Pinder
Two big employers have announced that they will now change the way they help employees with health insurance: instead of finding and financing that insurance, they will give employees a fixed sum of money and let them shop for their own insurance, writes Anna Wilde Mathews in The Wall Street Journal. The two employers — […]
Jeanne Pinder
The ClearHealthCosts phone rings. “Hello, do you have an office in California?” a woman asks. “I am looking for an MRI and I can’t find anyplace in California with prices as low as the ones you have.” I helped her find the San Francisco prices on the site — she needed an MRI of the […]
Casey Quinlan
Casey Quinlan of Mighty Casey Media (Twitter @MightyCasey, @CancerForXmas) gave powerful voice to a patient’s perspective on controlling medical costs on the email list of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Casey is a writer, speaker and media consultant, who was asked to write a blog post on the topic, which is reprinted here. Reblogged with permission from Epatients.net. […]
Jeanne Pinder
Guest Post from Neel Shah, M.D. Costs of Care Essay Contest 2012: Stories from Patients and their Caregivers Uncover Opportunities to Improve Healthcare Value As a presidential election looms and the American economy struggles to recover, the spiraling costs of healthcare have become a contentious political focal point without an obvious solution. Yet for patients […]
Jeanne Pinder
Thinking About Wal-Mart and the First World: “For its more than 8,000 stores in 15 countries around the world, Walmart (WMT, quote) is increasing its offerings in the health care sector with more vaccination shots. (Pictured: A giant underground Walmart in Guiyang, China, accessed via glass pyramids. These are starting with stores in the United States, where Walmart already offers […]
Jeanne Pinder
The phone rang the other day, and a man said “Is this ClearHealthCosts? You have a story about a place to get a $295 MRI. Can you tell me how to reach them?” We had run a blog post about RPN of California, the home of the $295 MRI, a surprisingly low price. Costs for […]
Jeanne Pinder
My new favorite place is the Laastari Clinics system in Finland. Why? I like their web site. Their CEO started following me on Twitter. And I can visit their clinics any time for only 45 Euros. It may be inconvenient to get there, but I like the feel of the place. Walk-in visits only, no […]
Jeanne Pinder
Sticker prices for surgical procedures vary widely, with charges for a Caesarean section ranging from $12,972 to $41,833, according to a new study by the the California Public Interest Research Group, according to an article in The Sacramento Bee. “A group of public-interest researchers took on the veiled, confounding world of hospital pricing Thursday in […]
