Patients cannot consent to care unless they know how much it costs

Americans rarely know how much their medical care will cost and most have received a medical bill that they did not expect.1 The lack of transparency around medical costs leads people to avoid seeking necessary care, fosters distrust in the US healthcare system, and has implications for informed consent.2 If patients do not know how much their care will cost—and the financial risk they may face as a result—can they really consent to it?What information must be disclosed to patients in the process of acquiring consent has often been the subject of ethical debates. A widely accepted principle is the reasonable person standard, which requires divulging the details a reasonable patient would want to know about a procedure, including its risks, its benefits, and alternative treatment options.How you decide which risks should be disclosed is also up for debate because it would be too burdensome to describe all the theoretically…
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