Can You Guess Which Healthcare Prices Consumers Actually Care About?
KFF’s Drew Altman explores and explains the answer.
Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation recently wrote a column with a curiosity-inducing headline: The only health care prices that matter to consumers. Can you guess what they are?
Out-of-pocket costs.
Surprised? We weren’t. It makes sense. In healthcare, the “list price” (aka the price a hospital or drug manufacturer sets for a service or drug) is usually not what people with health or drug coverage actually pay.
While requiring hospitals and manufacturers to make these list prices public could shed some much-needed light on the cost of medical care, these numbers on their own might not be very helpful to many people. What do patients really want to know? How much they’re actually going to pay. Wouldn’t you?
That’s why we list the costs our patients pay for prescription medications through Blink Health directly on our website — easily accessible on your medication’s landing page (like this). If you don’t have drug coverage, you can quickly see what you can expect to pay using Blink. If you do have coverage, it makes it that much easier to compare the Blink price with your coverage’s copay to see which is the better deal for you.
Healthcare pricing is complicated, to be sure. But the sooner the rest of healthcare can offer consumers the information they actually need, the better off we’ll all be.
Blink Health is not insurance. The discount prescription drug provider is Blink Health Administration, LLC, 536 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012, (844) 366–2211, www.blinkhealth.com
