How much does hip surgery cost?
"[Jamie] Rosenthal, now a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, was working on a research project at the University of Iowa about health-cost transparency. How easy, they wanted to know, would it be to find out the price for one of the most common surgical procedures?
Not very: Only 10 percent of the 102 hospitals contacted (two in every state and the District of Columbia) were able to give Rosenthal a complete price for the procedure, as she and her co-authors write in this week’s JAMA Internal Medicine. Even more, once they did track down the prices, they were all over the map, ranging from $11,000 to $125,000."
Now this is clearly broken. But realize, if you think the free market is the way to lower healthcare costs, you have to realize that you have to fix this first, and it's going to take a while.
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