Healthcare Digest 6/10: Over-Reliance on Healthcare Pricing Transparency

Healthcare Pricing Transparency is the current unicorn of choice that is going to magically accomplish everything: empower patients, make healthcare and insurance companies accountable, and lower prices.

Allegedly.

The idea is that, once we all know what things cost, we — as in consumers — will be able to get the cheapest price for things from angiograms to, I don’t know, tonsilectomies.

Is it going to do all everyone says it will? Of course not. Nothing can. Yet there it is, being floated as the be-all end-all of healthcare revolutions.

It’s necessary; I’d be dumb to argue against that. But I worry we put too many of our hopes in one basket.

Monday Headlines

A Q&A Regarding the Affordable Health Care Act: “Executive director of the Block Island Medical Center, Barbara Baldwin, comes to this position with experience from leading other healthcare agencies (three Planned Parenthood offices around the country) and other healthcare related projects (Rhode Island Healthy Kids Initiative.) With the national Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) scheduled for implementation in January, 2014, Baldwin felt this was a timely topic for discussion. The Center needs to gear up for change, Baldwin said, and she has some ideas on how that might be accomplished. This interview was conducted earlier this year.” [Block Island]

This Guy Sounds EXHAUSTING: “Tens of thousands of people have been treated by ZDoggMD – at least to a few laughs. Using satire, rap and sometimes, a Michael Jackson glove, hospitalist Dr. Zubin Damania takes his alter ego, ZDoggMD, to YouTube to sing about everything from insurance paperwork to prostate cancer.” [Med City News