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Ever really wanted something and then when you got it, realized it’s not what you asked for at all?
That’s kind of how we felt when we saw that hospitals were finally posting their prices online. Isn’t that a good thing, I hear you saying. It would be, except nothing is ever as it seems in the wonderful and wacky world of US healthcare. So now we get to see the hospitals’ chargemasters – the list prices for tens of thousands of services that hospitals perform – which have little relevance to what anyone might pay and are written in healthcare gobbledygook.
Check out this Kaiser Health News article to learn more about this frustrating non-event.
Seema Verma got it right when she said “this is a small step” towards price transparency. Very small indeed.
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