Whatever the Question, Transparency Isn ’t the Answer

Many in political (and non-political) circles have blamed a lack of pricing transparency for increasing healthcare costs. However, as recognized in a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, improving transparency is not the answer. More than half of the states in the United States have passed laws that either establish websites with health care prices or require plans, doctors, and hospitals to disclose them to patients. Some employers and other organizations even provide health care prices to employees and the public. However, according to the study, such transparency doesn’t always help patients spend less. The AMA article investigated the effect of transparency of the Truven Treatment Cost Calculator, a website that is available to more than twenty-one million workers and their family members. The website provides users with the costs (both the total price and the portion the user would be responsible for) from over three hundred services, including various sorts of imaging, outpatient operations and physician visits. The researchers compared outpatient health care spending of 150,000 employees who had access to the website with that of about 300,000 comparable employees who did not. However, despite its features, the cost calculator wasn’t popular. Even though sixty percent of employees with access to it had a deductible of at least $500, only ten percent used it in the first year of availability and twenty percent after two years of avai...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs