Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Zillow for Healthcare

Earlier this month, I posted on how a SoCal clinic had (finally) provided an example of my personal healthcare Holy Grail, a truly transparent healthcare pricing model. The challenge is that it's specific to this small, regional chain of clinics,and doesn't really help folks outside the immediate area, or with comparison to other providers (which don't share this information).

Now comes Amino, which "gives patients access to information on the cost of various procedures and how much experience doctors nationwide have in those procedures."

And there's no charge for using it.

The site is the brainchild of a former Zillow alum who was frustrated in his own efforts to find this kind of information for his own health issues:

"I realized just having the consumer experience that health care had offered me was really frustrating ... So I decided to build Amino to solve that.



Of course, this really isn't critical if one has no skin in the game, so it will be most valuable for folks with (for example) HSA-type plans:

When people pay their own way, they’ll start to shop and demand prices [says Twila Brase, president of the consumer group Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom] ... Lots of people wanted to force doctors to be transparent about their prices, but it didn’t matter until people pay their bills.”

Yup. Now, if we could just get to truly catastrophic coverage, these types of services should really take off.

[Hat Tip: The Political Hat]
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