Tag: Costs

Healthcare Price Transparency

Healthcare Price Transparancy

Posted on by jabittan
Have you ever tried to figure out what a healthcare procedure is going to cost you before you have the procedure? Almost no one can give you a straight answer, and it takes a long time to get a number at all because the doctor’s office has to check with your insurance to see what their agreement is, what you still have left with your deductible, and where you stand relative to your out of pocket maximum. The result is that consumers have very little insight into what they are actually going to pay or owe when they go to a check-up, when they need a new prescription drug, or when they have a knee operation at a local hospital.

 

In his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase addresses the lack of transparency in healthcare pricing. Specifically looking at the ways that insurance companies hide claims data from employers, Chase writes, “They want to maintain the status quo. This means protecting pricing opacity at all costs. If you could see the prices you actually pay, you might begin to wonder why a hospital with a large market share but mediocre quality outcomes is paid exponentially more than a smaller, high quality provider in the same network.”

 

Healthcare price transparency reveals disparities in our healthcare system and shows that healthcare costs are often not connected with quality or health outcomes. Cost is somewhat arbitrary and usually negotiated without the person who will actually be receiving the service. If we could see the costs, then we would be more likely to shop around, either for different insurance or for different healthcare providers with more reasonably prices for services and treatments. I think our health spending is generally rather inelastic, but nevertheless, if we better understood pharmacy pricing, basic medical services, and major surgery costs, we could start to move toward options that offered higher value.
Medical Technologies

The Problem with Healthcare Technology

Posted on by jabittan
In my last post I wrote about hidden costs of the healthcare system in America. I wrote about tax breaks for employers who offer health benefits, and I wrote about third party insurance preventing the healthcare system from working like a pure market. This post introduces one consequence of the hidden costs of our system and the ways in which our system fails to act like a market: the high cost of medical technologies.

 

In The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase writes, “We ended up focusing on a certain type of high-technology, acute medical care – which we financially reward far more than lower-level preventive and chronic care – without regard for the quality of the outcomes or value of the care.”

 

When I took a healthcare policy and administration class along with a healthcare economics class for my graduate studies, I was surprised to see a critique of advancing medical technologies as part of the problem of American healthcare costs. I live in Reno, under the sphere of influence of the Bay Area, where technological solutions to global problems are hailed as the cure-all, deus ex machina that we need for a peaceful and prosperous world. I always thought that better medical technology saved lives, made us healthier, and ultimately reduced cost by being more efficient and precise than older technologies.

 

As it turns out, new medical technologies are incredibly expensive, and often times the benefits that patients receive are only marginally better than what existing technology offers. In some instances those marginal improvements make the difference between life and death, but in many instances, the new technologies might only add a few months of life to a terminal diagnosis, a few additional months lived in pain and fear. In other instances, the new technologies might add a little more comfort or certainty in a patient’s procedure or diagnosis, but it is fair to question whether its really necessary and worth the additional cost.

 

The quote from Chase reveals that when we are shielded from the costs of care, and when we remove market aspects from the healthcare system, we adopte a mindset that healthcare equals expensive interventions with high cost technology. I had clearly bought into this narrative prior to my graduate studies. The alternative that Chase highlights in his book, which we have underdeveloped in the United States, is to move upstream, and take care of people at a preventative level before they are sick and before they need expensive technological interventions. Developing systems, structures, and norms for healthy lifestyles will do more to reduce costs than the development of new magical cures and technological fixes. Our priorities and the focus of our system is flawed, and a as a result we focus on high cost interventions within a system no one is happy with. Rather than develop a system that actually supports healthy living, we have fished around for quick, high-cost technological solutions to our health woes.