How much for a gyn exam?

How much for a 'GYN' exam?

One aspect of consumer driven health care is the establishment of health savings accounts (HSA). These accounts are funded by either by the employee and/or the employer. The accounts belong to the employee and are portable from job to job. From the health savings account (HSA), the employee pays for routine and preventative health care such as doctor's visits, health premiums, eyeglasses. Unused funds in the health savings account (HSA) would roll over each year.

While there are critics to the HSAs, more employers have been offering this option along with catastrophic health insurance to their employees. The catastrophic health insurance, usually a high deductible-low premium insurance policy, provides coverage for the unexpected medical crises ie hospitalizations, surgeries.

As employees accept control of their routine and preventative health expenses, how does the employee determine how much to spend for health services? Does the employee simply accept the price of a given provider, or does the employee shop around? Given that women are the major health care consumers, we asked women at the Gallery Mall in center city Philadelphia how much they would spend out-of-pocket for an annual gynecologic exam.

Over 500 women were surveyed in the Gallery Mall over one weekend in mid December, 2005. While shopping, the women were asked to respond to two questions: How much would you spend out-of-pocket for your next annual 'gyn' exam? and What zip code do you reside? For the first question, the women were given the following six (6) options: $0, $50, $100, $200, more than $200, or "other". If they chose "other", they were asked to specify an amount.

The women taking the survey came from 140 different zip code areas. The zip code – 19143- had the highest number of responses (33). The top five zip codes representing 24% of the responses were zip codes 19143, 19144, 19121, 19132 and 19134.

The response to "How much would you pay out-of-pocket for your next gyn exam?" ranged from $0 to $320. Over half of the women were willing to pay more than $100 for their next annual gynecologic exam. Whereas 7% of the women would pay no more than $20 for an exam, more than twice that number (15%) were willing to spend $200 or more. The average amount a woman was willing to spend was $97 +/- $5 with 95% confidence interval.




Which price is right? Given that neither the prices that doctors charge nor the amount insurances reimburse are openly shared, the responses do not necessarily correspond with either current prices or current reimbursements. So be aware. As HSAs become more common, information should come with the choices. Unless providers post their prices, they may continue to have others determine
the value of their services.