How messed up is our healthcare system?

This messed up.

Researchers compared prices amongst 53 hospitals for a standard heart procedure called a

cabbage or a coronary artery bypass grafting.

Not only did the researchers find a tenfold difference in price for the same procedure across

hospitals, from $44,000 to $448,000, but they also found no correlation between higher

prices and better quality of care.

Two studies have shown there can be up to a 39-fold variation in price for a simple

blood test across medical centers in the same metro area.

Here's the punch line.

We have no idea how much we're paying for healthcare services.

Why is it that when you need to get a surgery or medical test, you can't get a price the

same way you can when you shop for, say, an airline ticket?

Imagine if the airlines didn't post prices.

Instead, when you bought your ticket, Delta just said, we'll bill you after your flight,

because we don't know what the cost of fuel will be that day.

Then a week later, you get a bill for $4,000.

You'd scream bloody murder.

And rightly so.

Yet, this is precisely what we are dealing with in American healthcare.

With rare exceptions, when you go in for a back surgery or a thousand other kinds of medical

procedures, you have no idea how much it's going to cost you.

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