One of the biggest frustrations I see in health care is people not knowing how much procedures will cost them until it has already been performed and they have a bill in hand.

First let me start by saying I believe no one should be turning in a bill to your insurance company without you knowing first what they were going to bill you for and for how much the end result for you will be, except in life threatening and emergency situations. This means before you receive any procedure, you need to know how much that is going to cost you. Just like any contractor who does work on your house, he provides an estimate first.

I am considering meeting with legislators to create a law that would require providers to put in writing an estimate of health care expenses, specific to the person with their insurance, prior to receiving services. Of course this would only apply to non-emergency cases. A doctor/provider's office should be responsible for giving you a list of billing codes of procedures they expect they would use to bill your insurance. And the insurance companies have already negotiated a price for those codes based on your specific insurance plan. Now that needs to be put together and provided for the end user, you, so that you understand what your costs will be BEFORE the procedure takes place.

But I am developing my goal for how exactly this should be accomplished. I thought I would come to a forum to ask for input and brainstorming ideas.

I want to make this proposal as green as possible - least amount of paperwork to have to be used and stored by providers. Also we don't want to burden Dr.'s offices with extra staff to have to look up every code and contact every insurance company for patients in their office. So where do we start?

Some insurance companies have started to provide services on their websites that instantly provide estimated costs for their patients where a provider logs in, provides the patients information and bill codes. It looks up their current deductible, benefits, etc and provides an instant expected cost to the patient. So do we start with requiring all insurance companies to provide such services?

What ideas do you have on this area?