Tag Archives: price

A look at the landscape in health care price transparency

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About Joanne Kenen

Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Photo: Tax Credits via Flickr

Photo: Tax Credits via Flickr

High deductibles and out of pocket costs – which are increasing in both Affordable Care Act exchange plans and employer-sponsored coverage – have given new urgency to helping patients (or “consumers” as they’re called nowadays) learn about the cost and quality of care.

If you know both cost and quality, you know more about the value of care. (Assuming the treatment actually is the right and necessary course of care, but that’s a whole other conversation.)

Many programs and experiments are underway to figure out which tools are helpful to patients, how patients are using them, and what are their impact on health spending and utilization. The findings so far can perhaps be summed up as  “meh.” Continue reading →

Incremental progress seen in price transparency, but report may rate A+ among journalists

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

Source: Report Card on State Price Transparency Laws — July 2016, Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute, Sandy Hook, Conn., and Catalyst for Payment Reform, San Francisco.Here’s how price transparency should work for a woman with a silver-level insurance plan in one state. Assume this consumer could go to any hospital and would choose based on the cost of care, meaning her out-of-pocket costs (deductible plus co-insurance). She could pay $5,079 at the highest-priced facility or $3,531 at the lowest-priced hospital. The difference between the two is $1,548.

Source: Report Card on State Price Transparency Laws — July 2016Here’s how price transparency should work for a woman with a silver-level insurance plan in one state. Assume this consumer could go to any hospital and would choose based on the cost of care, meaning her out-of-pocket costs (deductible plus co-insurance). She could pay $5,079 at the highest-priced facility or $3,531 at the lowest-priced hospital. The difference between the two is $1,548.

Progress toward widespread price transparency comes slowly, according to the latest annual report from the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3) and the Catalyst for Payment Reform (CPR). In the “Report Card on State Price Transparency Laws – July 2016,” issued on Tuesday, the authors, Suzanne Delbanco, CPR’s executive director, and François de Brantes, HCI3’s executive director, explained what states are doing to give consumers the information they need to shop for care based on price.

As in past years, most states are doing poorly: 43 states earned an F grade for failing to meet even minimum standards. Last year, 45 states got an F. Continue reading →

Panel offers ideas on uncovering true costs of health care at #AHCJ16

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

money-and-medicineFor those of us covering health insurance, one of the best sessions at Health Journalism 2016 addressed the challenging issue of how to find the true cost of health care.

Moderator Bruce Japsen, who writes about health care and health policy for Forbes, kept the focus on where reporters can look to uncover the actual cost of care in their communities.

That generated a terrific pro tip from panelist Chad Terhune of Kaiser Health News. Continue reading →

Calif. publishes better insurance price and quality data, but gaps remain

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

California Healthcare Compare provides price and quality data for hospitals and physicians in 18 regions of California.

Source: California Healthcare Compare and Consumer ReportsCalifornia Healthcare Compare provides price and quality data for hospitals and physicians in 18 regions of California.

California has embraced the Affordable Care Act in big way. It launched one of the first and most robust state-run health insurance exchanges, and expanded its Medicaid program (known as Medi-Cal) to enroll the uninsured.

As a result, the state’s uninsured rate dropped from 6.5 million residents in 2013 (which is 17.2 percent of the state’s population) to 4.8 million last year (12.4 percent), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. (See AHCJ’s coverage of the bureau’s latest data release here and here.) Continue reading →

Debunking myths designed to hinder price, quality transparency efforts

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About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health reform. He welcomes questions and suggestions and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

When writing about transparency in health care prices and quality, journalists should expose the myths that health care providers promote. That’s the advice Francois de Brantes gave during a session on price and quality transparency at Health Journalism 2015 last month.

The executive director of the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3), de Brantes (@Fdebrantes) said, “Call them on their bull sh–. Their arguments against price and quality transparency are bogus.”

Yet when state legislatures consider laws promoting the public reporting of health care prices and quality ratings, provider organizations often lobby against these laws. “What are they protecting?” he asked. “Doesn’t the public have a right to know?” Continue reading →