Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online
I really like this push towards transparency but hopefully people who use the data / develop will make sure to understand the system and the data they're dealing with. Like list prices are often incredibly far removed from the actual dollars paid, and the actual amount paid is all dependent on insurer contractsI'd imagine hospitals hate this. Many of them are paranoid at what will happen if there is more transparency -- there's a union fighting Stanford hospital now and playing radio ads about high infection rates at Stanford. Other hospitals are worried about whether similar things could happen to them -- and hold their data tight to make sure no one has ammunition to do similar things. Hospitals in many cases market based on brand value rather than quality. In a closed world, hospitals can define quality any way they want. Everyone is #1 in something. If there's an objective standard for quality based on integrated data from hospitals nationwide, many brands will be tarnished. I'd be interested to see how hospitals respond to this push towards openness