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Health Care

How Much Will Your Health Care Cost?

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It can be difficult to find out ahead of time how much a medical procedure or test will cost you. Even your physician can be in the dark about this all important consideration.

Costs for health care services vary throughout the country, and different insurance companies may negotiate for different rates for services with providers and health care organizations. Call your insurance company to see if you can get an estimate for a service, and check to see whether your state offers an insurance web site for average pricing information.

Unfortunately, it may be difficult to get a price because medical costs are figured after insurance claims information is submitted to the billing department and processed.

If you want to estimate your costs ahead of time for a procedure or test, these websites are a good starting point:

APCD Council is a federation of government, private, non-profit, and academic organizations working to improve the development and deployment of state-based all payer claims databases (APCD). Pricing is based on claims data collected from insurers, Medicaid, and Medicare. Some states have consumer websites that are up and running like New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts.

FAIR Health is a national independent, not-for-profit corporation that uses a database of billions of billed medical and dental services to power a free website that enables consumers to estimate and plan their medical and dental expenditures. The website also offers clear, unbiased educational articles and videos about the healthcare insurance reimbursement system. Call 888-288-1441for more information.

Healthcare Blue Book is a free guide to help determine fair prices in your area for healthcare services. It is especially helpful for people who pay for healthcare out of pocket, have a high deductible or need a service that their insurance does not cover.  Continue reading How Much Will Your Health Care Cost? →

Health Care

Can Too Much Preventive Care Be Hazardous to Your Health?

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Politicians and pundits everywhere call for more disease prevention as a way to reduce healthcare costs. Certainly you cannot argue with the logic that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Or can you? It turns out that you can not only argue against that so-called logic, but – just as with cancer detection, which may have been done to excess in some protocols — you can mathematically prove that, at least for asthma, it takes a pound of prevention to avoid an ounce of cure.

The database of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium Inc. (www.dismgmt.com) tracks both asthma drugs and visits to the emergency room (ER) and hospital stays associated with asthma. The average cost of an attack requiring an ER visit or inpatient stay is about $2000. The average cost to fill a prescription to prevent or recover from an asthma attack is about $100. It turns out that asthma attacks serious enough to send someone to the ER or hospital are rare indeed. In the commercially insured population, these attacks happen only about 3-4 times a year for every thousand people. (The rate is much greater for children insured by Medicaid; additional resources spent on prevention could very well be cost-effective for them.) Continue reading Can Too Much Preventive Care Be Hazardous to Your Health? →