News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel

News, Analysis, Trends, Management Innovations for
Clinical Laboratories and Pathology Groups

Hosted by Robert Michel
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2014’s Healthcare Price Transparency Report Card Reveals Few States Are Making It Easy and Fast for Consumers to See the Prices Charged by Hospitals, Physicians, and Medical Laboratories

One reason is that the healthcare price websites operated by most states are inadequate, ‘poorly designed or poorly functioning’

Efforts to encourage price transparency at hospitals and other providers are making little progress. That’s one conclusion to be made from the second annual Report Card on State Price Transparency Laws, that gave a failing grade to 45 states.

This information is relevant because more consumers are now enrolled in high-deductible health plans. As a consequence, clinical laboratories and anatomic pathology groups must now handle requests from patients who want to know the cost of their medical laboratory testing in advance of service. As well, many of these consumers want to negotiate prices with their laboratory provider. (more…)

New Study Finds that Hospitals with “Clout” Are Often Paid Higher Prices by Private Insurers

Some hospitals are paid as much as four times other hospitals in the same city for the same procedure

Across the clinical pathology laboratory testing industry, the use of deeply-discounted prices for medical laboratory tests has always been a flash point. But few consumers see the real price of the clinical laboratory test, and even many healthcare policy experts pay little attention to how clinical laboratories and pathology groups will set prices for laboratory tests.

That is not true of the prices hospitals charge. Because of sustained efforts by Medicare, private health insurers, and employers to make prices more transparent for patients, more information on the pricing policies of different hospitals is becoming available.

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