Quit Wasting My Healthcare

Increasing Focus on Cost Comparison Tools

Davis Martin from CNN just wrote a new story on how to bargain hunt for healthcare services:  http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/10/health.care.price.comparison/index.html

This is just one article in a larger number of writings recently that have started to focus on how to accurately calculate / negotiate the true cost of care (thus saving money by comparison shopping and becoming effective healthcare consumers).    Compass is thrilled by the focus on what it believes is the key to controlling healthcare costs.  Unfortunately, some of the messages in these articles are misleading.

The true cost of care is what your insurance has contracted to pay your doctor or hospital.  The hospital pricing tools sponsored by hospitals typically reflect only the charge.  The charge is generally unrelated to the true cost of care which is set by a contract with your insurance company.  Likewise, services such as New Choice Health simply use Medicare cost data and multiply it by some factor to “estimate” what insurance pays.  Insurance contracts (and thus true cost) generally have no relationship to Medicare cost information which makes these estimates very inaccurate.  To accurately anticipate your cost and evaluate healthcare service providers you must have the agreed to price from the insurance contract or fee schedule.

It is this level of market knowledge that Compass brings to the table.  We help our customers get beyond rough cost estimates and use actual fee schedule / contract data to make provider choice decisions.  When you have the Compass level of support and knowledge, you can truly be confident of your ability to assess your market options as a healthcare consumer.