Revealing a Health Care Secret: The Price
By TINA ROSENBERG, NYT
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is an ambulatory surgical center in Oklahoma City owned by its roughly 40 surgeons and anesthesiologists. What makes it different from every other such facility in America is this: If you need an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, you will know beforehand — because it’s on their Web site — that it costs $6,990 if you self-pay in advance. If you need a tonsillectomy, that’s $3,600. Repair of a simple closed nasal fracture: $1,900. These prices are all-inclusive.
Keith Smith, the co-founder of the center, said that it had been posting prices for the last 4 of its 16 years. He knew something was happening, he said, when people started coming from Canada. “They could pay $3,740 for arthroscopic surgery of the knee and not have to wait for three years,” he said. Then he began getting patients from elsewhere in the United States and began to find out — “I get 8 or 10 e-mails a week” — that he was having an effect on prices far away. “Patients are holding plane tickets to Oklahoma City and printing out our prices, and leveraging better deals in their local markets.”
The Oklahoma City TV station KFOR, which ran a story on the Surgery Center on July 8, said that several other medical facilities in Oklahoma are now posting their prices as well.
KFOR’s story has been picked up by news outlets around the United States. Clearly what the Surgery Center has done is resonating.
(More here.)
The Surgery Center of Oklahoma is an ambulatory surgical center in Oklahoma City owned by its roughly 40 surgeons and anesthesiologists. What makes it different from every other such facility in America is this: If you need an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, you will know beforehand — because it’s on their Web site — that it costs $6,990 if you self-pay in advance. If you need a tonsillectomy, that’s $3,600. Repair of a simple closed nasal fracture: $1,900. These prices are all-inclusive.
Keith Smith, the co-founder of the center, said that it had been posting prices for the last 4 of its 16 years. He knew something was happening, he said, when people started coming from Canada. “They could pay $3,740 for arthroscopic surgery of the knee and not have to wait for three years,” he said. Then he began getting patients from elsewhere in the United States and began to find out — “I get 8 or 10 e-mails a week” — that he was having an effect on prices far away. “Patients are holding plane tickets to Oklahoma City and printing out our prices, and leveraging better deals in their local markets.”
The Oklahoma City TV station KFOR, which ran a story on the Surgery Center on July 8, said that several other medical facilities in Oklahoma are now posting their prices as well.
KFOR’s story has been picked up by news outlets around the United States. Clearly what the Surgery Center has done is resonating.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Interesting. The free market and free individuals,... works.
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