Do you understand your healthcare costs? See what New Orleans is finding.

For years I’ve blogged about the difficulty of shopping responsibly for healthcare. Well, late last week some big news broke – big enough that I did an overnight makeover of my home page and added a new page to my site. This is the first chance I’ve had to blog about it.

The news is that the work of my longtime friend Jeanne Pinder at ClearHealthCosts is finally getting the widespread attention it deserves: in New Orleans, award-winning investigative reporters at both Fox 8 TV and the Times-Picayune newspaper have dug right in and started using the ClearHealthCosts software system both to report the insane price variations and, importantly, let the public submit more to flesh out how much is known.

Fox 8 reporter Lee Zurik fired the first salvo, a 7-1/2 minute long segment – which, as you know, is a huge length of time for an evening news piece. Then Times-Picayune investigative reporter Jed Lipinski posted his separate piece – see screen capture above.

Here’s my page on the series with links to both pieces and all my past posts: Cracking the Code.

More to come, and here’s hoping many cities follow. We, the suffering consumers, danged well deserved to know where our money is going, and we deserve to know what our options are, before the bill arises.