Consumers struggle to find health care prices online: Study

Americans searching the web for health care costs are out of luck: Fewer than 20 percent of websites provide an accurate picture of how medical bills are tallied and what patients can expect to pay, according to a new study.

Researchers at Duke University used common internet search techniques to try to uncover the cost of specific medical procedures but found the information either listing confusing and irrelevant pricing or buried in a mass of unrelated content.

“It’s definitely a very frustrating process because even using simple, direct search terms, you’re just not coming up with a lot of websites that are helpful to you,” said Allison Kratka, lead author of the study published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The research showed that fewer than 1-in-5 websites gave appropriate local price estimates for specific procedures. More likely, internet sleuths mined through unrelated advertisements — like home repair — and articles about the importance of price transparency, without getting information on how and where to find accurate price quotes.

“We weren’t finding relevant prices that often,” said Dr. Charlene Wong, a co-author of the study and a pediatrics professor at Duke. “Even when we were finding prices, the quality of the prices was questionable and unclear.”

While out-of-pocket expenses for consumers increase, the marketplace for information on comparing prices is lagging behind, Ms. Kratka said.

“One of our take-home points is basically that this price transparency, as kind of a field, is not keeping up with new health insurance plans,” she told The Washington Times. “Consumers require better access to health care information.”

The researchers searched for the cost of four procedures — an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy, a cholesterol panel, a brain MRI and a hip replacement — and tried to mimic the typical consumer experience. They searched the internet using Google and Bing and focused on the first two pages of search results, clicking on every link.

They also changed location to perform searches in New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Seattle; Baltimore; Charlotte, North Carolina; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Tallahassee, Florida.

In Chicago, search results for the cost of a brain MRI ranged from $230 to $1,950, with little to no information about what would be covered under insurance. A hip replacement in the same city also was unclear, ranging from $27,000 to $80,000.

Of the 1,726 links surveyed — of which almost 400 were advertisements — only 17 percent of websites “provided geographically relevant price estimates,” the researchers found.

“Given the increasing number of Americans facing high out-of-pocket health care expenses, we need to promote policies that make it easier for them to determine the price of their medical care in time to inform their health care choices,” the authors concluded.

One of the study’s top recommendations is making information available and accessible — and that can start with state-government legislation. New Hampshire, for example, mandates that health care insurers and providers submit pay claims to a database that is published online. But poor marketing brings only 1 percent to 2 percent of the population to the website, Ms. Kratka said.

Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at health care consumer advocacy group Families USA, echoed the call by the researchers.

“Unfortunately, our healthcare system is just not set up to deliver that kind of information and in fact it’s set up to obstruct people from getting that kind of information,” Mr. Dorn told The Times.

“In order to fix this problem it really requires public intervention and legislation that providers make their prices available to consumers,” he added.