Healthcare Has Reached the Radical Idea of Showing the Price
A system famous for complicated bills is being invited to try the advanced commercial technique of explaining them.
The story
Mark Cuban proposes cheaper prescriptions and simpler, more transparent healthcare contracts. His plan targets costs faced even by insured patients.
Source: fortune.com
Our reading
In a normal shop, knowing the price is a modest prelude to buying something. In healthcare, the same ambition can sound like an ambitious programme of institutional reform. The customer has made it to the counter and is already requesting a structural change.
The peculiar elegance of complexity is that every additional layer can employ someone to explain why the previous layer cannot be removed. By the time a bill becomes understandable, the explanation risks looking like the most unusual service on it.
A cheaper option ought to be an ordinary discovery. Finding it after arranging financial protection produces a more specialised feeling: the satisfaction of locating the exit in a building you paid to enter. The absurdity belongs to that arrangement, not to patients trying to afford their care.
Transparency is an unusually unglamorous rallying cry. It promises no miracle, only the possibility that the person paying might understand the transaction. That is hardly the stuff of a heroic sales pitch. Yet here we are, awaiting the disruptive arrival of a legible receipt.