Tag Archives: price formation

Health Care Costs

Chicken & Egg in Consumer-Driven Health Care

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debtAn advocate of consumer-driven health care will often be challenged by this question: “So, when I am hit by a bus, or have a heart attack or stroke, or am suffering from dementia, you want me to go shopping around for medical care?”

Obviously not. Nevertheless, this is a serious challenge and invites the question: How much of our health spending can be meaningfully controlled by discriminating patients? Researchers at the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) recently addressed this. The HCCI has a unique advantage in producing such research, because has access to a database of claims for employer-based plans run by a number of insurers.

The research categorized “shoppable” versus “non-shoppable” services. It found:

  • At most, 43 percent of the $524.2 billion spent on health care by individuals with employer-sponsored insurance in 2011 was spent on shoppable services.
  • About 15 percent of total spending in 2011 was spent by consumers out-of-pocket.
  • $37.7 billion (7 percent of total spending) of the out-of-pocket spending in 2011 was on shoppable services.

So, it looks like only 7 percent of health spending is subject to price-conscious patients spending their dollars wisely. The researchers concluded that “Overall, the potential gains from the consumer price shopping aspect of price transparency efforts are modest.” That would be true if we were talking about just forcing price transparency on the current benefit design. However, that is a distraction. Continue reading Chicken & Egg in Consumer-Driven Health Care →

Health Care Costs

Price Transparency Laws Don’t Work

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HSAIn a functioning market, you know what you owe before you buy a good or service. That is not the case in health care, as we know. Because of increasing deductibles, the failure of price transparency is becoming increasingly irritating to patients.

Some believe a solution can be legislated. This has occurred in New York and Massachusetts; and one of my favorite state legislators, Senator Nancy Barto, has tried to legislate it in Arizona.

Effective January 2014, Massachusetts law requires health providers to provide a maximum price for a procedure within 48-hours of a prospective patient asking. Well, it has not worked, according to a ”secret shopper” survey of professionals conducted by the Pioneer Institute: Continue reading Price Transparency Laws Don’t Work →

Health Care Costs

Negotiate Your Doctors’ Bills!

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The idea that patients should take control of what they pay for medical care is taking hold among personal finance columnists. Noting “employer-provided health plan deductibles have risen 47 percent since 2009,” Mandi Woodruff of Yahoo! Finance has some good, common sense, advice on figuring out how much to pay for medical care. Here’s the first tip:

Figure out your medical billing code. Every procedure has a unique billing code (a unique five-number code you’d find on your doctor’s or hospital bill next to the service). Once you’ve got the right code, that makes it easier to call around to compare rates. Just be sure to describe exactly what you’re looking for; for example, an MRI of your lower back will have a different billing code than an MRI of your abdomen.

I agree absolutely. Nevertheless, this shows how far we have to go. Whatever good or service you buy as a consumer has some sort of inventory or billing code in the provider’s system, whether it’s a hardware store or a law office.

As a customer, have you ever had to figure that out?

Health Care Costs

Still No Transparency in Medical Pricing

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Entrepreneur David Williams has good insight into the limits of Health Savings Accounts as tools of consumer empowerment, discussing:

…… a consumer who did his darndest to find a good deal on a CT scan, finally settling on the $475.53 price at Coolidge Corner Imaging.

But the bill he got later was for $1,273.02 — more than twice as much — from a hospital he had no idea was connected to the imaging center.

“I was shocked,” said White, a doctor of physical therapy who thought he knew his way around the medical system. “If I get tripped up, the average consumer doesn’t have the slightest chance of effectively managing their health expenses.”

The patient wasted tons of time and effort trying to get the problem cleared up. He cared since he had a high deductible plan.

In my view, high deductible plans are a pretty crude instrument to encourage cost consciousness and price transparency. (David Williams, MedCityNews, June 2, 2015)

I agree. NCPA has long championed HSAs. However, stories like the one discussed here are too common. HSAs need to become more than a way to shift costs from premium to out of pocket. Health insurers need to get out of the business of fixing prices.

If we had not been distracted by Obamacare, we might be there by now. Hopefully, we’ll be back on track before too long. I have proposed a “common law” solution to the problem of price transparency. Read more about it here.

Health Care Costs

Price Transparency: Organizations to Watch

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George Washington University’s Master of Public Health program has complied a nice list of fourteen “organizations to watch” because they are moving the ball on price transparency. The woman who wrote the article, Emily Newhook, sent an email to NCPA bringing it to our attention. Unfortunately, we can hardly ever make time and space to profile lists compiled by other parties, but I decided to give this one a boost for a number of reasons.

First, it is exciting to see a school of public health get interested in this issue in a positive way. It was not too long ago that any proposal that included Health Savings Accounts or similar tools that removed healthcare dollars from insurers and returned them to patients brought forth wails of anguish from the public-health community about “barriers to care” and the like. Now, according to Ms. Newhook’s description: “This kind of price transparency empowers consumers to comparison shop for health care as they would a car, house or television, forcing higher priced providers to lower their prices to stay competitive.” This is unusual language for a school of public health, and is to be congratulated.

Continue reading Price Transparency: Organizations to Watch →

Health Care Costs

“I Felt Like A Hostage”: Towards A Solution for Medical Price Transparency

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I recently wrote an article critical of a business groups’ approach to improving transparency of prices for medical and hospital procedures. However, we do have a serious problem when it comes to figuring out how much we owe for treatment.

Magnifier over FiguresIn Saturday’s New York Times, the estimable Elisabeth Rosenthal has another excellent report (gated, for subscribers only) about a failure in American health care: Even insured patients cannot get prices from their healthcare providers.

Rosenthal writes about a woman who went to a dermatologist’s office, where a physician’s assistant cautioned her that a white spot might be cancerous. A biopsy confirmed it. Rosenthal then unfolds a “daylong medical odyssey several weeks later, through different private offices on the manicured campus at the Baptist Health Medical Center that involved a dermatologist, an anesthesiologist and an ophthalmologist who practices plastic surgery. It generated bills of more than $25,000.”

The patient’s share was $4,590, which she whittled down to $3,000 after much effort. A highly educated patient, at no point was she told how much her bills would be, nor given an adequate response to her requests for simpler and less expensive treatment. “I felt like a hostage”, she laments.

Continue reading “I Felt Like A Hostage”: Towards A Solution for Medical Price Transparency →

Health Care Costs

Crowdsourcing, Price Formation, & Health Information Technology

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From the perspective of the average patient, going about his life unconcerned about health policy or economics, what is the most frustrating characteristic of U.S. health insurance? Surely, it is the madness of the billing cycle: Never knowing how much a medical service costs until long after you’ve received it, and sometimes only after a flurry of phone calls and paperwork that can take months to clear up.

Last year, a non-profit called Costs of Care sponsored a national essay contest, inviting people to submit anecdotes “illustrating the importance of cost awareness in medicine.” One of the winning entries concerned a billing error for inserting an IUD.  Before the procedure, the patient learned (via “a few keystrokes”) that the cash price would have been $843.60. Insured, her out of pocket cost was to have been about $200.  Instead, she received a bill for $1,100 that took months to sort out.

Continue reading Crowdsourcing, Price Formation, & Health Information Technology →