Jeanne Pinder
She sent in several blood tests with substantial charges from the Mayo Clinic health system, with insurance via an employer. One was a basic metabolic panel, for which she was charged $138, and asked to pay $105 after the insurer’s writedown. She had a TB test too, for $104. She commented: “on top of this […]
Jeanne Pinder
The New York State superintendent of financial services, Linda A. Lacewell, announced that the state Department of Financial Services (DFS) has proposed an amendment to a regulation on New York’s Out of Network Law to protect New Yorkers further from surprise medical bills. In a statement in a press release, Lacewell said she was taking […]
Jeanne Pinder
We’ve launched a new partnership with CBS News, bringing transparency to the health care marketplace by telling people what stuff costs, under the name “Medical Price Roulette.” Here’s the first story from Anna Werner, national consumer investigative correspondent at CBS This Morning. She interviewed Frank Esposito, who faced close to $700,000 in medical costs after […]
Jeanne Pinder
(Posted August 2019; updates planned) How do you buy health insurance? We are frequently asked to help people buy health insurance. Our specialty is the cost of health care, not buying insurance. We don’t do individual consultations on what insurance to buy. We’re not really qualified for that, and also people must be certified and […]
Jeanne Pinder
Epic, the giant electronic medical records company, is offering a price estimate button that doctors can use in the office. Kristin Cain, a reproductive endocrinologist in North Dakota, posted this on Twitter: “EPIC has a button I just discovered: Patient Estimate. After you place an order, it estimates the out of pocket cost. Except if […]
Jeanne Pinder
“In the past six years, Claire, an IT infrastructure engineer living in New York, has spent thousands of dollars on medical care that most Americans never have to think about. There was hormone therapy, hair removal, and what’s known as ‘bottom surgery,’” Benji Jones writes at Business Insider “And that was just the start of […]
Jeanne Pinder
How can you save money on fertility medications for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other assisted reproductive technologies, like intrauterine insemination (IUI), egg freezing, donor eggs and so on? We’ve been hearing a lot about rising costs for these procedures, and particularly about the medications, despite insurance. A couple of stories came our way. This post […]
Jeanne Pinder
When my TED talk was posted again recently on Facebook, with prominent mention of disparities in lab test costs, there were a lot of comments. This one stood out, so I’m putting it here as part of our “A friend writes” series. She’s in the Knoxville, Tenn., area. “Yup!!! “I had a panel of tests […]
Jeanne Pinder
(Updated, December 2019) Our work with PriceCheck, our health cost transparency partnerships with media and other organizations, has stretched across the nation, bringing thousands of people to our partner web sites to share and search prices — from databases, from our reporting, and from our communities. We build interactive software and place it on our […]
Jeanne Pinder
There should be a law against this. This person had a CT scan and was charged a hefty fee. What does a CT scan cost? Well, $267 or $1,497, or $8,010? Look here and here and here on our blog. To find out what stuff costs in advance, look at this blog post: 10 questions […]
