Perspectives
Beyond Flights and Hotels
Why Healthcare Needs to Price the Whole Trip
Over the last decade, health plans have made strides toward transparency. Innovations like Surest’s upfront pricing and Curative’s simplified cost-sharing represent important efforts to make health benefits more understandable and less burdensome.
Yet these models—while promising—fall short in a critical way: they only show the price of individual services, not the total cost of care.
The difference is not trivial. It’s the same distinction between knowing the price of your flight and hotel versus knowing the entire cost of your vacation. If you’ve ever booked travel online, you’ve probably celebrated a great deal—only to return home and find your American Express statement bloated with restaurant meals, airport transfers, tours, museum fees, and “resort charges.” You saw a partial price. You paid the full one.
This metaphor applies to modern healthcare pricing models.
A patient may know the cost of a consultation, or even the surgery itself, but that tells them little about what comes next: imaging, anesthesia, post-op rehab, medications, complications, or follow-up appointments. Fragmented pricing creates a false sense of clarity and fails to deliver true predictability—for both consumers and employers.
Episode-based payment models address this challenge at its root. By defining and pricing the entire episode of care—from diagnosis through recovery—they offer a complete, bundled view of costs. And that matters.
Because care isn’t consumed as a series of disconnected services. It’s experienced as a journey. And journeys require full itineraries, not piecemeal invoices.
From a policy and plan design perspective, this shift matters deeply. It aligns incentives, reduces variation, empowers informed decision-making, and opens the door to shared savings. Most importantly, it reframes health benefits not as a cost shift, but as a systems-level redesign with both clinical and economic rationale.
If we want transparency to be meaningful, it has to be complete. Anything else is still just pricing the airfare.