The Price is Right. Not .
On April 3 the Wall Street Journal profiled Alan Hubbard, President Bush's point person on healthcare and a leading proponent of healthcare transparency. The debate about price data continues and so does hospital opposition. A cogent nail on the head of the issue in Matthew Holt's blog:
... Painful though it may be for the right-wing free-market crowd to hear this but no patient actually has the hospital "price" that is on the chargemaster paid for their care. Either the hospital is paid a discounted rate organized by the patient's insurer (e.g. the DRG case-rate Medicare pays), or the uninsured pay some fraction that they can--which is the subject of a contentious but separate debate. The relevant number for Hubbard and the consumer payment crowd is, what does the consumer actually pay out-of-pocket for hospital care? And the answer is, even with a high deductible plan, if they go near a hospital they pay pretty much their max out-of-pocket, and then not too much beyond that. And so the hospital's pricing schema is irrelevant to them. Which is why hospitals don't care about what their consumer pricing is and why they find it impossible to explain it.Tags: CDH, Consumer+Directed+Healthcare, Healthcare+Transparency, Hospital+Pricing, Online+PR
Posted by Shawn Whalen on April 13, 2006 at 10:31 AM
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