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How much will that cost, doc?

Do you shop around for the best price on a visit to the doctor, a CT scan or surgery at a hospital? If so, it looks like you've got a little more company.

In the latest NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll we asked people across the country whether they size up the prices for care before making decisions. And, if so, how they do it. We put the same questions to more than 3,000 people back in September 2010, and we were curious to see how much had changed.

Right off the bat, we wanted to find out the proportion of households that included someone who had received health care services in the past year. About 81 percent of the households we asked in April had, virtually the same as the 80 percent we found in 2010.

Among the recent health care consumers, 16 percent said they'd looked for prices beforehand, compared with 11 percent who'd answered that way in the previous poll.

OK, so where do they turn for price info? The most common source is a doctor's office, cited by 50 percent of those households that had checked recently on prices. But, that was down 10 percentage points from 2010.

The second-most-popular source was insurance companies at about 49 percent. And insurers were big gainers since 2010, when only about 26 percent of the price checkers consulted them.

Most commonly, people got the information in person at about 53 percent. That's up a bit from 2010, when it ran 47 percent. As a shopping tool, the telephone dropped in popularity to 48 percent from 61 percent in 2010. Email and the Internet zoomed to 45 percent from 22 percent.

A solid majority of people who sought information found what they were looking for. Most said it was accurate, though the overall proportion on that score dropped to 86 percent from 98 percent in 2010.

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More Americans Are Checking Prices Before Getting Health Care