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After years of delay, Massachusetts is taking another crack at a job that has proven especially tough: creating a one-stop online shop to help consumers make educated choices about their health care. The state’s Center for Health Information and Analysis has hired a vendor to design and launch a user-friendly website that includes the average prices of dozens of common health care procedures, safety and quality measures for individual hospitals, and basic information about obtaining insurance and getting care. (Dayal McCluskey, 4/14)

If you're insured, ask your provider or check the company's website for pricing tools. Many insurers now offer them, though not all are extremely useful. Some states have terrific pricing tools, such as Minnesota and New Hampshire, but a lot of the state resources are not so great. In Ohio, for example, the prices are simply the list or "chargemaster" prices, which are the top-end rates, and thus not very useful. The National Conference of State Legislatures has a scorecard of those resources. (4/13)