By DAVID INTROCASO
Last month the House Energy and Commerce and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committees passed three hospital price transparency (price T) bills by a combined vote 90-22. Afterward, HELP Chair, Dr. Bill Cassidy, stated he was ‘optimistic” and “confident” price T legislation would be enacted by the Congress this session.
Over the past decade federal policymakers have concluded price T will constraint or moderate hospital prices. In theory, the logic is straight-forward. By requiring hospitals to publish machine-readable files and consumer-friendly negotiated and cash rates for “shoppable” hospital services, transparency or disclosure will expose significant price variation empowering patients to comparison shop. In turn, this will spur hospital price competition and bend the healthcare cost curve.
Because research published by several major medical and health policy journals has concluded HHS’s 2021 price T regulation has failed, the Congress has decided to weigh-in by codifying and expanding HHS price T regulations.
This assumes much. Per Ken Arrow, medical care is not a typical commercial or market commodity. Think: information asymmetry. Clinical diagnoses are often emergent, unpredictable and accompanied by acute physical and emotional distress. Focusing on price ignores or excuses the fact that in functioning markets prices are largely determined by costs. Here, they are largely ignored even though hospital prices are poorly and unpredictably correlated to costs. Price T also tends to lead to tacit collusion where hospital prices converge or what is the price ceiling increasingly becomes the price floor.
More specifically, price T presumes B2B or business-to-business transactions, here moreover ERISA plan – hospital contracting, are the product of a functioning hospital market. Based on this false assumption, price T skips passed B2B to B2C, or to the business-to-consumer market where the consumer is expected to identify favorable hospital prices.
It is well-documented hospital concentration/consolidation has erased competition. There are simply price setting hospitals and price taking plans and patients or consumers. It’s no surprise that commercial plan hospital rates are on average north of 250% of Medicare and rates for common procedures can vary ninefold across hospitals.
For these reasons, when evaluated from a health equity perspective, price T disproportionately places the responsibility and burden on poor and rural patients. (As an aside, this year the Congress invited at least 11 expert witnesses to provide price T testimony. None addressed and/or had health equity expertise.)
Among other substantial cognitive and financial burdens, these populations are already time poor, likely already face healthcare-related financial burden or vulnerability, experience higher rates of emergency care, have comparatively limited health literacy particularly when faced with opaque and intimidating cost estimates, are frequently confronted by a digital divide in accessing online estimator tools or downloading multi-gigabyte machine-readable files requiring broadband internet. For these and other reasons their response frequently is to delay or forge care altogether. As a de facto buyer-beware mechanism, price T can act as a deterrent.
Price T also assumes geographical density and provider substitutability. In rural America single hospital systems or Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) often serve as the sole provider within a ~100-mile radius. For a rural county resident, knowing that a hospital 75 miles away charges $250 for an MRI is largely irrelevant. Geographic distance, lack of public transit and travel costs negate price differentials. Imposing strict price T compliance requirements backed by increasingly severe civil monetary penalties for non-compliance can unintentionally strain negative margin rural providers by in part diverting personnel and capital toward maintaining data feeds.
For these populations particularly, with nowhere else to go, price T is a paradox. With information without options, it’s an oxymoron. With transparency in a concentrated market, it’s a distinction without a difference, serves as a signal for dominant hospitals to drift toward higher prices or a is non-sequitur by attempting to apply a demand side shopping remedy in a supply side monopoly. Price T can however serve as an essential prerequisite allowing even the most vulnerable to shop their way to affordable healthcare if it is paired with guardrails that create a functioning market or one with systemic accountability. This can be accomplished if the Congress decides to take the necessary step and like emerging drug pricing policy require the use of external reference pricing. Hospitals or any supplier cannot be allowed to control price and also serve as an objective judge of it.
David Introcaso is a healthcare research and policy consultant based in Washington, D.C
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