Tag Archives: khn

UK’s Dartmouth-esque atlas yields familiar results

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Writing for NPR’s health blog, Christopher Weaver looks at the NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare, which is similar to our Dartmouth Atlas. While they don’t have an interactive map up yet (they promise one will come next year), it has generous helpings of maps and graphs. The full PDF comes out to 100 pages and 19mb.

The most and least surprising thing about the NHS atlas? That, despite vastly different health care systems, it yields much the same results as the American version. I’ll let Weaver explain:

Before you blame … inconsistencies on America’s money-driven health system, take a look at Britain’s effort to anglicize the Dartmouth work: Doctors in some areas such as the college town of Oxford do one type of hip replacement at rates up to 16 times greater than in places like London, according to a November atlas by the National Health Service.

The British atlas is surprising because “doctors are not by and large paid on a fee for service basis in the NHS,” Angela Coulter, director of global initiatives for the Dartmouth Atlas-associated Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making, said at a Salzburg Global Seminar session this week. “It illustrates the fact… that doctors tend to favor the treatments they’re trained to provide,” even when money isn’t a factor. Most British doctors get salaries rather than payments for each procedure like their American colleagues.

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For more European health news, see AHCJ’s Covering Europe initiative.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Why California hospitals can charge so much

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California hospitals, especially those in the Bay Area, seem to be able to set prices with impunity, a fact we know in part because the state requires an unusual level of hospital finance disclosure. This week, Kaiser Health News reporter Jordan Rau took advantage of the available records and dug through hospital spending databases and a long list of sources to figure out just what gave certain hospitals the leverage to charge so much more than competitors offering equivalent services. For a quick review of the data unleashed by this law, I recommend reviewing the map and charts that ran alongside the story.

As you might expect, the underlying explanation is complicated. When Rau asked the hospitals why prices were rising, he got a familiar refrain. They blamed it on the need to make up for low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, as well as charity care, and reminded him that technology is expensive and that their particular patient populations were unusual in ways that naturally obliged them to charge extra.

Those are certainly all part of the equation, but Rau investigation seems to point in another direction: Garden variety economic clout.

State laws have inadvertently given hospitals even more leverage. California requires health maintenance organizations to have “adequate networks” that offer all major specialties reasonably close to where patients live. Lisa Rubino, president of Molina Healthcare of California, an insurer, says the law makes it difficult for insurers to drop big hospitals from their networks.

“You have to work with them or make a strategic decision to get out of the area because they can dig in,” says Rubino.

Rau elaborates on this idea in a companion piece on NPR’s health blog, in which he points out how the industry has deftly squashed two different efforts to increase transparency in their pricing practices.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Healthcare.gov coming July 1

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KHN’s Phil Galewitz previews the July 1 launch of a federal website he says “will give consumers a list of all private and government health care plans for individuals and small businesses in their areas,” a service required by the reform bill, and one that has never before been part of the modern system.

The initial site will just provide basic information on each plan, but a planned October upgrade will include what Galewitz called “detailed cost and benefits information,” the precise nature of which is still being negotiated. Insurance groups, predictably, say that sharing all the information HHS plans to provide will just lead to confusion and higher costs. Consumer groups disagree.

Insurers including UnitedHealthcare and Aetna say HHS is going too far in planning to list certain data, such as the percent of claims that health plans deny, the rate at which they cancel policies after customers get sick and the number of times patients appeal coverage decisions. They say the data would mislead potential customers.
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The site can “be the great equalizer so consumers can have equal access to information and be on the same playing field as insurance companies,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, co-founder of Health Care for All New York, a consumer health care coalition. “The government needs to make the information as open as possible.”

Until 2014, when stricter provisions of the reform bill go into effect and such practices are no longer permitted, the site will list only the “sticker prices” of the plans, and insurers will still be allowed to charge sicker patients more.

Andrew Van Dam of The Wall Street Journal previously worked at the AHCJ offices while earning his master’s degree at the Missouri School of Journalism.