California Physicians Post Prices for Competitive Comparison

Southern California physicians company, HealthCare Partners Medical Group, has become the first large healthcare organization to make their prices publicly available to prospective patients for simple medical procedures. The PDF document Fees for Basic Services provides a list of charges for common procedures such as immunizations, physical exams, and basic preventive care, as well as office visits related to illness or injury.

Competitors ultimately drove the move to post the prices since growth of walk-in clinics at malls and stores that provide services like vaccines and ultrasounds have been competing more effectively and openly with hospitals and clinics on a price transparency basis.

As employers have begun asking their employees to share the burden of astronomically increasing health insurance costs, co-payments and deductibles have been on the upswing and patients have started shopping around a lot more. Though a small co-payment of $5 to $15 doesn't hit patients in the pocketbook, an annual deductible of $2000 that might need to be met before insurance kicks in have helped patients be a lot more disciplined in deciding whether an office visit to their doctor is such a good.

And now that retailers like Wal-Mart are getting into the walk-in clinic business by offering their trademark always low prices we could soon see more and more healthcare providers competing for patients by publishing prices... maybe even, to borrow a page from blockbuster auto insurance success Progressive, alongside the prices of their competitors. Now there's an idea who's time has come and just might be the only market-driven mechanism for controlling out of control healthcare costs.