Health care costs lack transparency. Specifically, it is impossible for consumers to determine prices across insurers. We launched a crowdsourcing project to shed light on these prices. We asked the audience of our three organizations to share prices of what they were charged, what their insurers paid and their own co-pay (if any). We did specific on-air callouts, one per month, during the four-month prototype period. We reported on the prices and variation we found during the month of each callout. To our knowledge, no other project of this type has ever been done. This type of public and detailed price information is rare. We were funded by a prototype grant from the Knight Foundation.
