LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The pandemic helped make online shopping almost universal, even for big ticket items like houses and cars, which has people of all ages now expecting to be able to look up a product, find a price, and pay for it.
Ironically, the same worldwide health crisis has not made online shopping for healthcare any easier or even any clearer, despite a year-long push by the federal government to get hospitals to post prices online for consumers to see.
"Unfortunately, I don't feel like we're very close," said Dr. Gerry Jones, Chief Medical Officer for CHI St. Vincent Infirmary. "I had a mentor that used to say nothing hard is ever easy."
Hospital administrators like Dr. Jones have been dealing with the easy-sounding task of posting prices, but have instead been noticing that it is indeed very hard.
The requirements kicked in at the start of last year, with standard prices listed on spreadsheets along with the rates hospitals negotiated with insurers.
The goal is to give consumers some transparency and a way to price-shop among providers in a given area.
Some health care chains in other parts of the country dragged their feet when it came to complying, but here in Arkansas the big hospitals have cooperated.
Unfortunately it doesn't mean pricing is any easier to find or understand.
"We're inching towards that price transparency, we're still not there yet," said Krutika Amin, Policy Expert with Health Care Think Tank Kaiser Family Foundation.
Amin and administrators at Little Rock's three largest hospitals were asked to help navigate their price menus, where UAMS (University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) and Baptist Health both have price transparency pages on their websites.
CHI St. Vincent's standard charges are available, but require a few extra clicks.
We wanted to shop around for a knee replacement, one of the most common inpatient surgeries performed in the United States.
Amin points out, the differences in how hospitals present the information is part of the reason comparison shopping is so difficult and deviates to such a large degree.
"What we found is that hospitals were posting these codes and the payment rates in all sorts of different formats," said Amin.
Once our hypothetical knee shopper begins looking around, they'll open up spreadsheets, leading to hundreds of rows and dozens of columns filled with all kinds of medical terms that one would probably have to google.
In our search, we opened the UAMS spreadsheet and searched for arthroplasty, other known as knee or joint replacement, and eventually found item 466 "Revision of Hip or Knee replacement with MCC." Those last three initials stand for "major complications or comorbidities" which is how most patients will be classified.
The first column of average prices on the UAMS spreadsheet lists that procedure for $72,007. The Baptist Health chart looks similar, with item 466 listed for $122,301.
Representatives from both hospitals point out that the first figure is an average of all the prices negotiated with insurance companies.
The consumer could try and identify their insurance plan's rate on the sheet, but Amin said that's one example of how complicated the concept can become as insurance coverage plans can have similar names but far different prices.
Those complications are exactly why CHI St. Vincent goes a different direction.
"Rather than giving a wide range, which we felt like confused people more than answer their questions, we want to give them that place that gets them started," said Dr. Jones of the system's online cost estimator tool.
CHI St. Vincent sees the consumer in a light similar to a used car shopper holding an Edmunds Blue Book or online price guide.
All three hospitals said that additional costs may come up depending on individual needs or type of procedure, which could add to the overall bill. A patient can't point to the spreadsheet, or menu, and expect that to be the price they will pay.
In the end, most experts agree, while being able to see these prices might help shoppers make a decision, this new push for transparency isn't exactly making health care more consumer-friendly.
"Price transparency can help the market understand what other players are paying, but price transparency isn't in and of itself an end-all to the affordability of health care issues that we face as Americans," said Amin.
And administrators like Dr. Jones appreciate the step in the right direction while waiting to see if the pandemic alters what may be a long road ahead.
"I think it's inevitable that we are going to go back and reassess our health care delivery models," he said. "How do we pay for health care in this country? How do we provide the highest quality health care that quite frankly, we can afford?"