Currently, the patient isn’t the “customer”; so says Steve Forbes, Editor-In-Chief of Forbes Magazine. Transforming patients into customers also means empowering them to shop for lower-cost healthcare like they already do for other purchases.
Sadly, that hasn’t been possible so far—you can’t Google to find the lowest-cost, high-quality provider that’s also nearby for a medical test or procedure.
Video: What If Everything Worked Like Healthcare
What is also sad is that healthcare prices vary wildly among providers for the exact same procedure. To make things worse for the patient, the old rule—you get what you pay for—simply doesn’t apply to healthcare. Research shows there is no correlation between quality and price in the healthcare industry.
Empowering your employees to shop for lower-cost healthcare procedures can lower your organization’s total healthcare costs—and, also help with employees’ out-of-pocket expenses. In fact, Steve Forbes wrote about it in the November 29, 2016 issue of Forbes Magazine:
“– Transparency for prices. Require hospitals and clinics to post their prices for all treatments, medications and services. The disparity in pricing can be astonishing. An enterprising entrepreneur, Mark Galvin, who is also CEO of MyMedicalShopper in New Hampshire, found that the fee charged by hospitals and clinics in the region for a nuclear stress test for heart patients ranged from about $1,450 to $7,000.
The third-party-payer system and the lack of pricing transparency is why health care doesn’t experience the fast, relentless pressure of lowering costs that’s routinely found in other markets.
If wide-screen TVs had fallen under the auspices of today’s medical system we’d still be paying $10,000 for them instead of a few hundred bucks.“
MyMedicalShopper does just that—it is a healthcare comparison shopping platform. The company makes shopping for medical tests & procedures as easy as a Google search, unleashing billions in savings on healthcare costs.
What’s more, combining MyMedicalShopper with HSA-compatible health plans can be magical!
See Is a health savings account (HSA) better than a 401(k)? You decide.
