Tools to help estimate the costs of medical procedures

Nationally, a number of consumer groups and government agencies have put together tools to try to make it easier to estimate the costs of a medical procedure before you have it. Among them:

Healthcare Blue Book, which describes itself as a "free consumer guide to help you determine fair prices in your area for healthcare services.

Fair Health Consumer Cost Lookup, an "independent, not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to bring transparency to healthcare costs and health insurance information."

If you're comfortable with Excel, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have also pulled together a lot of pricing data on the 100 most common inpatient services and 30 common outpatient services.

So what do you do if you're uninsured and are facing huge bills for a needed procedure? See our "can't afford health coverage" web page, which lists:

• Many assistance programs, including those that cover children, veterans, pregnant women, those needing organ transplants, disabled workers, etc.
• Low-cost help for vision and hearing problems
• Free- and low-cost dental clinics
• Free breast-, cervical-, and colon-cancer screenings, HIV care help and support, etc.