Recently I needed a simple outpatient medical procedure. Like most small businesses, we have a high deductible on our health plan, so I called the physician’s office and asked for a general idea of how much it would cost so I could budget for the expense. Simple right?
I’ll give you one guess what happened next. After being shunted through three back-office people and doing everything short of waterboarding them to get an answer, I finally received a flat: “I’m sorry, but we just can’t tell you how much it will cost.”
Ridiculous.
Is there another product or service in the world that you have to buy without even a rough estimate of how much you’ll pay for it?
Not only is this making it terribly hard for individuals and small businesses to budget healthcare costs, it’s a huge factor in why we can’t get healthcare costs down to levels that resemble sanity. How can you price shop if no one will tell you the price?
So big kudos to Aetna for its new Expense Management tool that helps individual insureds plan and manage their healthcare expenses. Their online payment estimator uses the individual’s plan details and deductible to give a real-time estimate for costs of medical tests and procedures. And it allows the individual to compare prices at various medical facilities in the area.
This tool is so long overdue it’s almost staggering to think it’s not universal. We don’t currently have Greenleaf’s plan with Aetna, but when we come up for renewal next year — assuming our current provider doesn’t launch a similar estimator — you can bet I’m going to get a quote from them.
(Full disclosure, I used to work for Aetna, but they are not currently a client of ours.)
