Waldo in this case is hospital price transparency.

Those of us in the business were still digesting the contents of the Consolidated Appropriations Act (12/27/’20) - which included ‘The No Surprises Act’ requiring hospital price transparency -  when I wrote Tip # 492 a little over a year ago.

So how are ‘they’ doing; they locally being Advocate/Aurora, Ascension, Children’s Wisconsin, Froedtert and ProHealth Care .

You be the judge.

I’ve provided a link above to what I found for each System. If you were shopping for the lowest cost of by-pass surgery, for example, it would take a lot of effort (luck).

Oh, and when you need that kind of acute care, do you have time to ‘shop’ or is cost what really matters?

There’s actually a ton of health care transparency information out there now and not just from the hospital websites.

For example, check out https://www.fairhealthconsumer.org/ (I’ve mentioned the Healthcare Bluebook on many occasions, but it’s no longer free.)

Next week I’ll suggest another way – post care – to make use of this information.

P.S. “Slava Ukraini!”