Health Care reform

I see that people want to throw money at health care. That they want to make files electronic. That they want single payer options. Etc...

These ideas may all have some value but until you can go into a doctor's office and be told a) what a procedure or test will cost and b) whether it is covered by whatever insurance you have, you will never be able to make intelligent choices about health care on the spot.

What other item in your life are you expected to agree to buy without knowing the cost? A very irritating aspect of health care is how the doctor orders, for example, blood tests, and you start getting bills a couple weeks later where you find out that not all of them are covered, or not all of them are covered at the same rate or some of the work was done by people not in your network even though they were in the same building or, finally, there is no relation other than the patient's name and the date that you can see between what is on your statement of benefits for the visit and the doctor's description of what was done. If you cannot read these things carefully, you are out of luck. Our daughter was sick in the summer. The first visit, before she was diagnosed correctly, they sent her home as having a bad cold, and no blood was drawn. After she was diagnosed with mono two weeks later and the bills started coming in we found they had retroactively claimed to have done a blood test on the first visit. Which we would have paid for twice if we had not noticed.

So, my idea is no non-emergency work without knowing what it will cost and what the true value of the test is. I don't want a battery of tests to save a trip if the odds are that two or three will suffice.