In other words, you are a payer. Behave like other payers, notably, the insurance companies.

This infrastructure is lacking and needs to be built– and it will be now that people in high deductible plans need to know and are creating accountability.

I had a similar experience with my first derm purchase through a high-deductable account (I had to pay full fright for retin-a).

The bigger issue is that the health fee schedules used by most insurance companies is still based on an after-the-fact cost-+ billing model that originated from the early days of fee for service. Until that changes (and universal healthcare proposals seem to want to lock-it infor perpetuity), you won’t see significant movement on pricing transparency.

Lucky for me, it was in-network. But because it was a more complex surgery than expected, the surgeon billed a different CPT than one normally would for removal of lipoma. I just got billed after the fact for a $40 copay, and no one at Oxford is interested in my argument that the only way we could have known ahead of time what the procedure would be is if I had had an expensive MRI or CT scan. Would their outsourced radiology benefits management company have approved that? Yeah, right.

You may not be able to find out Humana’s fee schedule, but Medicare is the standard, and that’s available to the public through the CMS.gov website. Try to negotiate paying Medicare rates.