Trillions of prices per month

Healthcare providers often struggle to decide how much a procedure will cost, especially for insured patients. Out-of-pocket patients will ask about a specific price only to be told, "we don't know the price until the end of your visit." This is obviously dysfunctional. Patients can't be expected to sign a blank check for every healthcare encounter.

But the problem isn't too little price information. In fact, it's the opposite – there is far too much. Turquoise Health writes:

Since July 2022, health insurance companies have been required to publish how much they pay healthcare providers for nearly all health care services. ... Insurance companies are posting in total about a petabyte per month of price data. ... A petabyte is a truly astronomical amount of information — many hundreds of trillions of numbers. With only 66% of Americans covered by commercial health insurance, how is it that we need trillions of numbers to represent health care prices for only 220 million people?

Incredibly, Turquoise Health is successfully crunching all that data every month. But even the reduced data "is still a challenge for traditional database systems." And this data doesn't help individual healthcare practices provide exact quotes beforehand. Even using the crunched data, patients can only get estimated prices.

If you're an out-of-pocket patient (most Americans are), you can solve the pricing problem by joining Pocketero. Pocketero members are entitled to price quotes before their appointment. That way you aren't signing a blank check – if you know what you need, you know what you'll pay.