[karmajunkie]

There's a law called The Funeral Rule[1] that, among other things, requires that funeral homes provide a General Price List and quote prices over the phone without the consumer being required to give contact information.

The equivalent is sorely needed in healthcare. One of my biggest (indeed, one of my only major) complaints about the ACA is that neither the GOP nor Democrats saw fit to make any moves towards requiring pricing transparency in the law. Its a travesty. This is a free-market reform that would have completely on its own transformed the economics of the industry, even for consumers that couldn't do the research under acute circumstances.

Even without that, the ACA is far from a trainwreck. I'm guessing you didn't have to spend a lot of time dealing with procurement of individual policies prior to the ACA. I did, and its a godsend.

[1] http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0300-ftc-funeral-rule

[aggieben]

> I'm guessing you didn't have to spend a lot of time dealing with procurement of individual policies prior to the ACA. I did, and its a godsend.

A lot? I guess not, but I did shop for individual (+family) insurance plans before the ACA, and I much prefer the before to the after. I absolutely despise the stupid metal-color tiers, in which every single plan is a cookie cutter of another within the same tier. Nevermind that plans that before ACA could be obtained relatively cheaply are now quite a lot more expensive - in some cases, more than double. So there is far less consumer choice, and everything is more expensive. If that's not a trainwreck, I don't know what is.

P.S. - I 100% agree about price transparency. I'm ambivalent whether the way to accomplish it is through a regulatory rule.

[karmajunkie]

Well, I did it a lot, every 12-18 months for about ten years before the ACA, and between trying to find out if a given plan actually covered something like maternity care (and under what circumstances), trying to gather and provide medical records for as much as ten years prior to initiation of coverage, and dealing with the first attempt to get a claim covered (when invariably the company in question would start making attempts to claim a condition was preexisting), there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what we have now, while imperfect, is absolutely better than pre-ACA.