Jeanne Pinder
Summary: Women and their insurance companies are paying wildly varying prices for mammograms, and doctors and clinics are charging wildly varying prices, we found in our crowdsourcing project with the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Read on to learn more and hear some horror stories, or… CLICK HERE FOR PRICES
Jeanne Pinder
Our friend who was ordered to get a second mammogram, which was not covered by insurance, wrote to us again (if you missed it, here’s her first post.) Between insurance? You’ll learn a lot. So, about my quest to find out the price of a second mammogram, because my insurance covers only $600 in testing […]
Jeanne Pinder
Charges are not the same as payments. This morning’s news brought a big helping of Medicare charge information: the release of a dataset of charges to the government’s Medicare program by hospitals across the U.S., as described in this article from The New York Times. What’s charged by hospitals, of course, is seldom what’s paid […]
Elizabeth Celms
Free birth control under the Affordable Care Act (ACA)? Really? For everyone? Well, maybe not. You might have to wait until 2014. The Affordable Care Act’s stipulation that preventive services should be free went into effect in August 2012, and many women were ready to pick up their free birth control. Indeed, the ACA’s preventive […]
Elizabeth Celms
(Updated 2018) Birth control pills can come at very different prices. Sometimes they’re actually more expensive if you have insurance! Covered by insurance or not, there are a few things you need to know about how pricing works, and where you’ll pay a lot or a little. It’s different depending on your insurance, on your […]
Sherry Mazzocchi
SUMMARY: About an hour before Karin S.’s bedtime, two people in lab coats knocked on her door in Queens, New York. They were there to put her to bed. They followed her to the bedroom and attached sensors and electrodes to her scalp, face, hands and chest. They hooked her up to a polysomnography machine. […]
Sherry Mazzocchi
(Updated, Oct. 2019) Daytime dozing, excessively loud snoring and fitful sleep are all reasons to have a sleep study. So how much does a sleep study cost? The answer: it depends. Keep reading for more information and advice. There are several different types of sleep studies. ClearHealthCosts researched the most common ones. A polysomnography (medical […]
Jeanne Pinder
Is it time for rate-setting in the health-care marketplace? Is it time for single-payer health care? Or an end to the entire for-profit system of mis-aligned incentives? Or transparency? Can we continue in this vein? The article Steven Brill wrote in Time magazine’s current issue about the rising cost of health care, “Bitter Pill,” has brought a […]
David Voran, M.D.
Summary: We hear a lot from doctors who see the problems of the health care system from a perspective that’s often surprisingly revelatory. Occasionally, we meet someone who’s a good doctor, writer and thinker all at the same time. Dr. David Voran is one; he wrote this for us about the problems his patients encounter […]
Jeanne Pinder
It’s hard for patients to find prices for medical procedures in advance, even for common things, a new study finds. Our readers won’t be surprised, but this was a thorough investigation by a trio of respected scholars, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study catalogs the scholars’ attempts to find […]
