In non-emergency situations, I try to do a simple cost benefit analysis on any medical product or service. Finding the cost, for anyone who's tried to do it, is difficult and frequently ambiguous or opaque beyond some multiple order-of-magnitude guess - $40 or $4000. I get the impression that very few people try to do price discovery and thus very few select based on price.
I think an important reason for this is that, unlike a Big Mac, where the dollar (or eight) goes from my after-tax wallet to the McDonald's cash register at the time I eat the hamburger, my health product dollar goes from either my employer's pocket or my pocket, possibly through my income tax returns or HSA, and an insurance company, and some accounting at the doctor's office, and the state indigent fund and Medicaid (because my dollars get mixed in with the uninsured and low income people's treatment costs) and the ACA (because of APTC and CSR), and the hospital's accounting office, and a pharmacy benefit manager, and a drug company who might provide discounts, and a copay and a deductible and coinsurance, and one to three months on the calendar, and maybe some other people and steps that I didn't list, and end up in the doctor's or hospital's pocket.
I've got an MBA and am in the national MBA honor society - I have a plaque and donation solicitation emails to prove it - and have several family members directly involved in health care and I can't figure it out. No wonder nobody tries to figure out the cost. And if people don't try to figure out the cost, it is no wonder there is little incentive for the doctors and hospitals to try to compete based on prices and price transparency.
I'd like to move closer to the Big Mac model, but other than asking for prices for my own medical products and services, I don't have much idea how to do so. I think the current Rube Goldberg system we have is pretty entrenched.
