“The provision of parking prices would suggest that hospitals can indeed answer telephone queries about costs—when they want to,” authors Jillian Bernstein and Joseph Bernstein write.
This study is a follow up to another one that the latter Bernstein worked on, where he and his co-authors called hospitals to ask how much a hip replacement would cost. Like in this study, they found that about 10 percent were able to provide a price. The idea here was to test out whether that had to do with the complexity of the procedure. A hip replacement’s price could vary if, for example, there was an unexpected complication.
This new ECG study suggests that its really not about the complexity–that, overall, hospitals just aren’t good at providing prices.
“Hospitals seem able to provide prices when they want to; yet for even basic medical services, prices remain opaque,” Bernstein and Bernstein write. “Accordingly, medical insurance payment schemes that promote concern about prices without a commensurate increase in price transparency are apt to be ineffective.”