Â鶹ŮÓÅ

Usually when we shop, finding the price is the easy part. Cars, airplane tickets, burgers and beer; it’s all right there. But when it comes to health care, an industry we spend $3 trillion ... a year on, prices often remain a mystery. Some people say that genuine cost transparency would make some of the waste and price variations vanish. It's not easy breaking open a black box that, intentionally or not, richly rewards doctors, hospitals and insurers. (Gorenstein, 3/27)

Paying for "value" — that prized mix of quality and cost — is widely cited nowadays as essential in slowing the rise in health care costs. The catch is that measuring quality and cost is proving to be much more difficult than often acknowledged. The inescapable and significant challenges are made clear in a website the Wisconsin Health Information Organization launched this month to rate physician clinics. (Boulton, 3/28)

For a generation, doctors in New York’s economically depressed neighborhoods have been the ugly ducklings of the medical hierarchy. Many are foreign born and foreign trained, serve mostly minority and immigrant patients, and often run high-volume practices to compensate for Medicaid’s low rate of payment. Now these doctors are in the vanguard of an experiment to transform New York’s health care services for the poor from a disorganized hodgepodge into coordinated networks of doctors, hospitals and other practitioners. (Hartocollis, 3/30)