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The rising cost of health care is one of the biggest problems we face as a nation. One major issue: it’s often impossible for consumers to easily find out the cost of tests, treatments and services. CBS News has teamed up with journalists at ClearHealthCosts, a New York City journalism startup bringing transparency to the health-care marketplace by gathering information from you about what you’ve been billed for medical procedures and telling people what services costs.
ClearHealthCosts is not a shopping site. It is crowdsourced data in our news reporting to shine a light on the health care marketplace and arm you with useful pricing information that can help you make informed choices as a consumer of health services. And, if you choose to be contacted, CBS News may reach out to interview you for our reporting. You can also search a database of prices. We have collected some prices by surveying providers and community members.
Of course, cost isn’t everything — most people don’t want the cheapest appendectomy or MRI so much as high quality at a fair price. But just as there is little transparency in health costs, there is also little transparency in measures of quality. We’re taking this step toward price transparency in the belief that price transparency will lead to a good discussion about quality metrics.
We know that we have not created a guide with every price, for every procedure, at every provider in the U.S. But if we work together, we can build a resource that can help us all.