By Jan Greene Just came out of a session at Health 2.0 about websites that help consumers with their medical bills and health insurance. Here are the highlights: Change:healthcare is my current favorite among these types of sites. It addresses the same issue as this blog talks about: The yawning gap between what consumers...
By Jan Greene I'm blogging live, because that's what bloggers do. Exciting, isn't it?I'm sitting in a roomful of 1,000 people who are hearing about how innovations on the web are going to help people better understand their health, find providers, stay healthy and figure out their medical bills. This is a daunting task...
By Jan Greene This may be a foolish thing to do, but I'm going to publicly discuss my lower back problems. This is dangerous because I buy my health insurance on the individual market, which means that anything that places me in a category of undesirable risk could make me uninsurable in the future....
By Jan Greene Tom McGrath, a writer for Philadelphia magazine, took the time to try to figure out why the bill for his young daughter's appendectomy was $29,000. What he found out was how arbitrary medical billing can be, that hospital bills are highly fictional accounts of what a hospital may actually want, need...
By Jan Greene I had the opportunity to meet a family that's been through hell and back, but managed to remain smart and informed consumers of healthcare even as their toddler son endured a long and difficult fight with liver cancer. The Clarks, Richard and Diane, realized their son Dillon was sick during a...
By Jan Greene The folks at Consumers Union, who publish Consumer Reports Health, have taken their show on the road this summer to bring attention to the many and varied flaws in the U.S. healthcare system. You can track their progress on their Cover America Tour site. Ultimately, the three young campaigners in an...
By Jan Greene Wasn't that some culture's curse — may you live in interesting times? Well, in healthcare we're smack in the middle of interesting times, and they don't want to let up. I've been busy with work (a good thing for a freelance writer! A bad thing for a blogger!) so I've been...
By Jan Greene In our continuing quest to advance healthcare transparency, I'm seeking out websites that reveal actual prices that hospitals (and other healthcare providers) charge for their services. Nothing is ever that simple, of course; the bottom line for a hospital stay or other service is going to depend on your health plan...
By Jan Greene There's a really interesting column in the Wall Street Journal this week by Dr. Benjamin Brewer, who writes regularly about his experiences in the American health system. He talks about taking his daughter to an emergency room for stitches and getting a surprisingly high bill. His comments address what this blog...
By Jan Greene One of the many frustrating things about paying for healthcare these days is finding out how much you should be paying for a hospital-based service. It's completely hit-or-miss if you call a hospital's billing department and ask how much they would charge, list price, for a given procedure…maybe an elective surgery...