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The Article in Brief
Sticker Shock: The Experience of a Health Care Consumer
David T. Grande
Background A family physician shares his family's experience attempting to navigate urgent medical decisions in a high-deductible health plan and how he resolved that it is unrealistic to price-shop in urgent and emergent situations.
What This Study Found The author describes how in accessing urgent care for his child's arm fracture, he unknowingly encountered 10-fold pricing variation for a plain film x-ray, a routine, low-cost technology. He asserts that if insurers are going to sell high-deductible health plans, they need to do a better job identifying outlier prices and making those prices part of their negotiations with providers. Moreover, he contends that physicians also need access to better pricing information--ideally situated within the electronic health record--to make prices part of routine discussions so that patients can avoid unnecessary and potentially disruptive out-of-pocket expenses.
