Phone More Popular Than Internet When Seeking Prices For Health Care

If you want to know the price of something in health care, we wish you luck. There's no easy way to comparison shop. And the particulars of insurance coverage, if you're fortunate enough to have it, can add another confusing layer to cost questions. We wondered if smarter people had figured out a way to do this. And the folks at Thomson Reuters agreed to help us find out. In a survey they conducted early this month, more than 3,000 people told us about their experience shopping for health care. For better or worse, most people don't even bother to check out the costs before getting some sort of diagnosis or treatment. Someone in nearly 80 percent of the households surveyed received some sort of medical diagnosis or treatment in the past six months. But only 11 percent of those people bothered to look for prices first.