A Stitch In Time…Will Cost A Lot of Money

By Kim Bellard, December 5, 2013

It almost seems like piling on to pick on hospital pricing anymore, following such incisive articles already this year such as Steven Brill’s Time article “Bitter Pill” or Elizabeth Rosenthal’s “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” in the New York Times, but there just continue to be more examples of how irrational health care charges are in the U.S. health care system. 

Jillian and Joseph Bernstein just published a study in JAMA Internal Medicine, focusing on the difficulty in getting hospitals’ prices for electrocardiograms (ECGs) – and comparing that with the ease of obtaining those same hospitals’ prices for parking.  This followed a study published earlier this year that looked at the difficulty of getting hospitals to quote prices for hip replacement.  The Bernsteins were testing the hypothesis that perhaps hip replacements included too many variables, thus making quoting prices difficult, and so chose the more standardized ECGs. 

The results will probably not surprise anyone.  They contacted twenty Philadelphia area hospitals to ask for the two kinds of prices.  Nineteen of the hospitals were easily able to provide the cost for parking, but only three could come up with a price for the ECG (and don’t you want to know what hospital couldn’t even quote its own prices for parking?).  It’s also interesting to note that the three ECG prices they got ranged from $137 to $1200, almost a tenfold difference.

The authors conclude that “hospitals seem able to provide prices when they want to; yet for even basic medical services, prices remain opaque.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Rosenthal of The Times was at it again, this time in “As Hospital Prices Soar, a Stitch Tops $500.  The article points out not only simple stitches that cost $500 in ERs but also IV bags that cost under $1 but for which hospitals charge $137, or $20 neck braces for which that hospitals want $154.  And these are not the most egregious examples cited. 

Few people pay full charges, of course – except for the people without insurance, who are probably least able to pay them – but the hospitals build their charge structures due to what one physician told The Times was the Saudi sheikh problem: “you don’t really want to change your charges if you have a Saudi sheikh come in with a suitcase full of cash who’s going to pay full charges.”  That’s what passes for pricing strategy in U.S. hospitals?

The Times attributes the seemingly unfettered hospital pricing to increasing market dominance, using Sutter Health in California as a prime example.  Indeed, a recent study in JAMA found that price increases – not increased demand or aging of the population – accounted for 91% of the increases in overall health care costs since 2000, with market consolidation blamed as one of the key drivers of these price increases. 

We’ve been waiting for patients to care about prices for some time, especially with the advent of high deductible plans, and there is some evidence perhaps that is starting.  A survey by TransUnion Healthcare found that 55% of insured consumers have started to pay more attention to their medical bills in the past year, and that 67% claim they want to know not just how much services cost them directly but also how much their insurance is paying on their behalf. 

The TransUnion survey also found that, when it comes to choosing providers, consumers rated “makes it easy to see the cost of services” right below “world class specialists and technology,” and – amazingly -- above high quality scores or proximity to home.  Even more interesting was that the survey found some correlation between consumers’ perception of quality of care with their satisfaction with the billing experience, a fact to which one hopes providers are paying close attention. 

Ironically, health plans now are expressing some concern over exactly what type of transparency they support.  AHIP, their trade association, indicated that calls for an all-payer claims database, which would facilitate comparisons between providers and across payors, could backfire, raising the spectre of lower paid providers demanding higher reimbursements once they started seeing what other providers were being paid.  Having once led transparency efforts for a large health plan, I can affirm that this concern is very much on the minds of provider contracting staff.

At the same time, many physician specialty organizations, including the AMA, continue to balk at many forms of transparency.  Lately they have questioned the wisdom of a proposal to make public the Medicare payments to physicians, something the Wall Street Journal, among other organizations, has long been pushing for.  They worry that the data could be confusing or misleading to consumers, although it’s hard to see what could be more confusing or misleading to what we’re doing now.

Still, not everyone is a fan of transparency, at least not as it has been attempted so far.  The ever-quotable, always insightful Uwe Reinhardt, writing recently in JAMA, throws cold water on many previous efforts.  In his words, “[T]he idea that American patients should 'shop around for cost-effective health care' so far has been about as sensible as blindfolding shoppers entering a department store in the hope that inside they can and will shop smartly for the merchandise they seek,  In practice, this idea has been as silly as it has been cruel." 

Reinhardt does think that health IT can change the game by more easily making pricing available to consumers, citing such innovators as Healthcare Blue Book and Castlight Health.  He likes the reference pricing approach (which I discussed recently), which involves setting a uniform payment limit and making providers compete for anything they want to try to charge above those limits. 

Of course, simply disclosing costs is only a necessary, but not sufficient, change to bring about true competitive pressures for pricing.  We’re moving to ICD-10 codes, and a cottage industry has emerged to find the funniest examples.  For example, there are separate codes for being struck by a turtle, orca, or duck, not to mention for walking into a lamppost.  You know that in back offices of provider organizations and health plans, diligent bean counters are coming up with prices for each of these. 

If we merely made visible the existing pricing structures, which are built for billing and diagnostic accuracy rather than for consumer understanding, it’d be liking going to Dr. Reinhardt’s metaphorical department store and finding that each item showed the cost of every party involved in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of the item, plus costs for a variety of additional variables based on the consumer’s needs.  No exactly an Amazon one-click kind of experience.

Despite the big challenges ahead for it, I do believe that, whether it is AHIP, AMA, AHA, or any other providers making a living in the current arcane system, there is a danger that if they don’t get on the transparency bus, they may get run over by it.  The Saudi sheikh strategy can’t last.

Comments

[Laurel]

Thanks for this analysis.
I had noticed an uptick in articles like the NYTimes Stitch article which should get people upset. I find the media likes to do this rather than provide consumer education.
Also note the trend in stand-alone ER centers because of the current profitability. Always opportunists.
Still the consumer has no backdrop on types of coverage, few in my seminars know what an "EOB" is much less how to read it. Am encouraged by JAMA finding pricing is not (yet) age impacted.