Alan: Americans have colluded with medical cost obscurantism by considering "medical care" so sacred that "the authorities" are entitled to whatever "privacy criteria" they want to use.
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Blood test can cost from $10 to $10,000 in Calif. hospitals. "Imagine walking into a hospital and being charged more than $10,000 for a blood test to check your cholesterol level. Imagine then going to another hospital in the same state and being charged $10 for the same test. That’s what a team led by a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco found when it looked at the prices California hospitals charge for 10 common blood tests. Researchers studied charges for a variety of tests at 160 to 180 California hospitals in 2011 and found a huge variation in prices. The median charge for a basic metabolic panel...was $214. But hospitals charged from $35 to $7,303, depending on the facility. None of the hospitals were identified." Lena H. Sun in The Washington Post
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