Health Care Pricing Typically Remains Hidden

Patients often don't know what a treatment will cost until after the treatment is given.

The issue of hidden prices is especially important for people with no insurance or those who have plans with high deductibles.

"If an individual doesn't have health insurance, what the hospital or physician will do is essentially bill ‘list price’ and that is almost always higher than the negotiated price of an insurance company," said Dr. Robert Graham, M.D.

Graham is a professor of family medicine at the University of Cincinnati. He explains that insurance companies, because they deal with large volumes of patients, are able to negotiate with health care providers to pay lower than list price.

Websites like Florida-based NewChoiceHealth Incorporated are trying to arm patients with pricing information so they can compare.

"We believe the best place to start for the consumer is to give them enough information on pricing so they can make better choices," said Brad Myers, Co-founder of NewChoiceHealth.

The site compares a variety of pricing. For example a bone X-ray at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences costs $325, according to NewChoiceHealth. The site says the same X-ray at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles costs $1,100.

"If the consumer is doing the decision-making, all of those different inefficiencies are forced out of pricing," argues Myers.

Graham says that various reform measures in Congress are trying to bring more transparency to pricing.

"What the hospitals say is we've got a set price which we believe recovers our costs plus a margin and the fact that we negotiate a lower price with an insurer doesn't mean we're going to change our set price," said Graham.

He says, however, that there is little transparency to the current system.

"The basic problem that exists in the middle of all of this is whether you're insured or un-insured, you have no idea what the price is," Graham added.