Why you should know the cost of your medical treatments

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Guests: Melinda Beck, Anne Weiss and Peter Ubel

When it comes to the cost of treating an illness, do you know how much your care costs? Many experts believe if patients would be more value- and cost-conscience when it comes to choosing where they receive care, overall health spending could be significantly reduced. Of course, all this would require providers to make their charges public so that patients could become smarter health-care consumers. Given higher co-pays and deductibles many health plans require, health care price transparency could be an idea whose time has come. The looming question is how do you convince people that more expensive isn’t necessarily better? Our guests in this hour of Radio Times are Wall Street Journal writer MELINDA BECK, ANNE WEISS, Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and physician and behavioral economist PETER UBEL.

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