Am I a Bad Mother … Or Just A Lucky Survivor in the Game of Healthcare Roulette?

from The Meck Deck by Tara Servatius:

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So what does a rational consumer do in this situation? Normally you price shop, you bargain and you make difficult decisions. With modern medicine, my husband and I quickly learned, that’s impossible. Doctor’s office staff literally can’t answer a simple question every other business owner knows the answer to off the top of their head: What does your service cost?

“That depends on your insurance company,” they’d tell me, or ”We don’t know what we get paid until we file, so you’ll have to call them.”

So I did. The insurance company rep told me I’d have to call the doctor for the price, because they couldn’t say either until I went to the appointment. Are you freaking kidding me?

“OK, what if I’m paying out of pocket, what would it cost then?” I’d ask the people who worked at the doctors’ offices. They all essentially said the same thing.

“Well that would depend on how long the doctor spent with you,” they’d say. “OK, then surely you can tell me how much a block of his time costs,” I’d say. That way we could plan out a quick, to-the-point appointment.

“No. That depends on what he does,” they’d say.

“Well what are the options for what he might do?” I’d ask. “Can you give me a price range?”

“We can’t say until we see you,” they’d say. It annoyed these people that I would even inquire about price. You could hear the exasperation in their voices.

Without exception, at every office I called in town, the person I ended up talking to in billing eventually got snippy with me. When I asked for at least a best and worst case scenario price range, two of the offices I called refused to give me one at all. Two others gave me ranges that were ridiculous. Maybe $189 to $400, but no guarantees, one told me. The other office put it at $175 to $400.

Excuse me, but who the hell runs a business this way in America? The consumer can’t know the price and comparison shop? Heck, even the plumber I use in Charlotte will quote me a specific price before he starts digging in my front yard, even though he doesn’t know exactly what he will find...

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I can even envision a future health care system in which colds, the flu and strep are treated at drugstore clinics — which are quite good – freeing up doctors to deal with more serious matters. And I can see alternatives to doctors’ offices and expensive health insurance subsidized prescriptions, like the kind Walmart has begun to develop, flourishing.

Maybe the market, if allowed to, could drive the actual cost of an appointment down to $50 without insurance subsidy, the level at which my family would again likely be willing to go to an appointment for every sniffle and fever.

Or maybe if we did things this way parents like me would eventually bet wrong and a child or parent would be damaged or killed by skipping an appointment and missing something serious. There’s no telling.