this Ted Talk Features journalist and health care costs investigator Jeannie Pinder Recorded live at Ted Residency. 2018. Support for Ted Is Brought to You by Wells Fargo. This is a commitment to better banking. This is

Wells Fargo. So a little while ago, members of my family had three bits of minor surgery about 1/2 hour each, and we got three sets of bills for the 1st 1 The anesthesia bill alone was $2000. The 2nd 1 $2000 the 3rd 1 $6000 So I'm a journalist. I'm like, What's up with that? I found out that I was actually for the expensive one being charged $1419 for a generic anti nausea drug that I could buy online for $2.49. I had a long and unsatisfactory argument with the hospital, the insurer and my employer. Everybody agreed that this was totally fine, but it got me thinking that where I talk to people than where he realized, nobody has any idea what stuff costs in health care. Not before, during or after that procedure test. Do you have any idea what it's gonna cost. It's only months later that you get an explanation of benefits.

That explains exactly nothing. So this came back to me. A little while later, I had volunteered for a buyout from The New York Times write work for more than 20 years. As a journalist, I was looking for my next act. It turned out that next act was to build a company telling people what stuff costs in health care. I want a shark tank type pitch contest to do just that. Health costs eight up almost 18% of our gross domestic product last year, but nobody has any idea what stuff costs. But what if we didn't know? So we started out small. We called doctors and hospitals and asked them what they would accept as a cash payment for simple procedures. Some people were helpful. A lot of people hung up on us. Some people were just plain rude.

They said we don't know or our lawyers won't let us tell you that. But we did get a lot of information. We found, for example, that here in the New York area you could get an echocardiogram for $200 in Brooklyn, or for $2150 in Manhattan just a few miles away. New Orleans. The same Simple blood test. $19 over here, $522. Just a few blocks away. San Francisco. The same M R I $475 or $6221 just 25 miles away. Thes pricing variations existed for all the procedures and all the cities that we serve it. Then we started to ask people to tell us their health bills in partnership with public radio station W N Y C. Here in New York,

we asked women to tell us the prices of their mammograms. People told us nobody would do that, that it was too personal. But in the space of three weeks, 400 women told us about their prices. Then we started to make it easier for people to share their data into our online searchable database. It's sort of like a mash up of kayak dot com, and the ways traffic up for health care. We call it a community created guide to health costs are surveying crowdsourcing rigor into partnerships with top newsrooms nationwide in New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami and other places. We use the data to tell stories about people who are suffering and how to avoid that suffering. To avoid that gotcha bill, a woman in New Orleans saved nearly $4000.

Using our data, a San Francisco contributors saved nearly $1300 by putting away his insurance card and paying cash. There are a lot of people who are going to in network hospitals and getting out of network bills. And then there is the hospital that continued to build a dead man. We learned that thousands of people wanted to tell us their prices. They want to learn what stuff costs, find out how to argue a bill, help us solve this problem that's hurting them and their friends and families. We talked to people who had to sell a car to pay health built, go into bankruptcy skipper treatment because of the costs. Imagine if you could afford the diagnosis, but not the cure. We set off a huge conversation about costs involving doctors and hospitals, yes, but also their patients. Or as we like to call them,

people. We changed policy, a consumer protection bill that had been stalled in the Louisiana Legislature for 10 years passed after we launched. Let's face it, this huge, slow rolling public health crisis is a national emergency, and I don't think government's gonna help us out any time soon. But what if the answer was really simple? Make all the prices public all the time. Would our individual bills go down? Our health premiums be really clear about this. This is a United States problem. In most of the rest of the developed world, sick people don't have to worry about money. It's also true that price transparency will not solve every problem. There will still be expensive treatments,

huge friction from our insurance system. There will still be fraud and a massive problem with overtreatment it over diagnosis. And not everything is shop herbal. Not everybody wants the cheapest eh, pen deck to me or the cheapest cancer care. But when we talk about these clear facts, we're looking at a really issue. That's actually very simple. When we first started calling for prices, we actually felt like we were gonna be arrested. It seemed kind of transgressive to talk about medicine and health care in the same breath. And yet it became liberating because we found not only data but also a good and honest people out there in the system who want to help folks get the care they need at a price they can afford. And it got easier to esque. So I'll leave you with some questions. What if we all know what stuff costs in health care in advance? What if every time you Googled for an M R I,

you got drop downs telling you where to buy and for how much the way you do when you Google for a laser printer? What if all of the time and energy and money that's spent hiding prices was squeezed out of the system? What if each one of us could pick the $19 test every time instead of the $522.1? What are individual bills? Go down our premiums? I don't know. But if you don't ask, you'll never know. And you might save a ton of money, and I've got to think that a lot of us and the system itself would be a lot healthier. Thank you

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