Due to changes in our health care system a growing number of us will be responsible for paying our medical bills directly.  Whether it’s because you don’t have insurance, or you have a high-deductible plan like my family has, you will be paying the doctors, hospitals and labs directly for their services.  Thus it stands to reason that you’ll want to know how much something costs and if it can be had cheaper somewhere else.  Well, good luck finding the information you want.

Yesterday I posted about my wife’s $1,900 MRI scan which was done on her shoulder in August.  I’ve gotten a couple of comments on that post plus some email sent to me directly that provide a few anecdotes from people who have dealt with similar situations.  The most interesting comment came from Mona Lori who dealt with a very similar situation to ours and decided to do some research into the cost of an MRI. She shares the results of her research in this report and what she found was a HUGE disparity between different providers for the same procedure, an MRI scan of a knee.  She found that one provider in Milwaukee would do the scan for $600 while another in New Hampshire charged $3,500.  At that discrepancy it would make sense to fly to Milwaukee to have the scan done because even with the cost of the airfare and cab ride you’d be saving a couple of thousand dollars.

Mona decided to do something about this and started a web service called OutOfPocket.com where people can share what they paid for services at various providers.  Of course that means you can also search to see what people paid for procedures at different places as well.  If enough people share their data there will soon be a rich database of prices for procedures which should lead to more informed shopping and hopefully lower prices as providers begin to lose their monopoly over the health service pricing information. Let’s put it this way, if I know that an MRI will cost $1,900 at one facility and $1,000 at another which do you think I’m going to use?  If those numbers become public and easily accessible how long do you think it will take the vast majority of people to shift their business from the more expensive facility to the less expensive one, and then how long would it take the more expensive facility to lower its prices?

A point I’d like to make is that most people think the cost of health care is equivalent to the cost of seeing their doctors.  Honestly the doctor’s costs is less than the x-rays, MRIs, lab tests or drugs.  In other words the parts often cost more than the labor, so if you want to reduce your health care costs you might want to start with the parts.  After all, whether or not a doctor is good is a highly subjective measure.  A doctor might be brilliant, but a real jerk that makes you feel horrible.  Is he still a good doctor, and is he worth paying three times more than the guy who didn’t graduate from Harvard Medical School but is still really good at what he does and also happens to be a really nice person who makes you feel good about yourself?  On the other hand an MRI, is an MRI, is an MRI.  Why pay triple for the exact same thing?

If you have information to share please use OutOfPocket.com or any other health pricing service you know of to share it.  Until the providers are forced to offer pricing up front in an easily accessible manner it’s the best way for us to control our health care expenses.