The ABCs of Healthcare Costs
The ABCs of Healthcare Costs uses storytelling to illustrate the vast discrepancies in hospital charges for patients receiving the same treatments and procedures. In order to make this information relatable to the general public, we follow three people who have similar costs in their everyday lives, but face very different costs for their healthcare. The visualization shows that these three people, despite living in similar areas, face hospital charges that range dramatically. We also have extrapolated how these differing costs might affect their lives going forward, as healthcare costs do for Americans every day.
To create this analysis and these three representative people, we drilled down into the data and used several publically available data sets to find three places with similar costs for housing, gas, cars, and daily shopping, but vastly different costs for a specific procedure - in this case, hip replacement, one of the most common medical procedures in America and one that many people can easily relate to. We also looked at related outpatient costs for the same three hospitals that we used for the hip replacement costs.
We believe that seeing a representation of ordinary people facing different financial outcomes based on nothing more than which hospital they choose to visit will spur the public to learn more about hospital charging procedures and demand action from their local institutions and public officials.
Video link: http://youtu.be/b6c0uUMF62A