From one way of looking at it, the big carriers are caught in the middle, between the providers that aggressively raise their prices each year and the employers or individuals who are starting to realize that there’s no bottom to the pit into which they throw their premiums and deductibles each year.
On the other hand, no one in the U.S. healthcare system has been better-positioned to use their combined purchasing power to force delivery organizations to finally focus on the value of the services they provide than those same large carriers. Yet, over and over, they’ve been happy to pass those escalating prices on to the people paying their premiums – with just enough of a markup to ensure their own profits aren’t at risk.
Part of problem is semantics. As Vitalware CEO Kerry Martin recently said, there is an important difference between healthcare “costs”/“charges” and healthcare “prices,” but the lines between them are often blurred. People say, “healthcare costs are increasing” when it’s more accurate to say “healthcare prices are increasing.”
Think of it this way: Healthcare costs are what it costs hospitals to perform certain services. These haven’t really gone up over the years, evidenced by the fact that cash prices – what people who forgo insurance and choose to self-pay – have seen few fluctuations.
What has gone up are the prices that carriers negotiate off those costs/charges to turn a profit. Prices are increasing, with no added benefit to beneficiaries. Perhaps, health benefits should be renamed health detriments.
It’s a broken system, ripe for disruption by upstarts that can attack the areas of biggest waste, while the incumbents focus on protecting their legacy service bundles.
A recent JAMA study pinpoints those areas with the greatest opportunity for change. The greatest source of wasteful healthcare spending, accounting for $265.6 billion of the estimated $760 billion to $935 billion industry total, came from administrative complexity, defined as “waste that comes when government, accreditation agencies, payers and others create misguided rules.” Complexity by design is the root cause. Thomas Sowell put it well, “People who pride themselves on their ‘complexity’ and deride others for being ‘simplistic’ should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”
The second-greatest source of waste, accounting for between $230.7 billion and $240.5 billion, the authors identify as pricing failure, or “waste that comes as prices migrate far from those expected in well-functioning markets, that is, the actual cost of production plus a fair profit.” Essentially, this is waste that comes from the cost versus price loophole carriers, and hospital executes have historically taken advantage with a devastating impact on the working and middle class. There is no bigger contributor to 20 years of wage stagnation and decline than hospital profiteering.
See also: Pricing Right in Life Insurance
This gap, historically too opaque for consumers to notice, is now quite salient, thanks to all the news coverage that surprise medical billing got in 2019. Many informed consumers are no longer afraid to give their medical bills a long and hard review, questioning not only why they would pay an arbitrary price, but also the quality of care they’re buying. They’re aware that, despite the high prices they may be paying, there’s often little return on their healthcare investment, and as a result are becoming pickier and picker about the providers they choose.
Some in high-deductible health plans are even going so far as to research what their providers’ cash prices are, and if they’re less than what they’d pay prior to hitting their deductible, are making the conscious decision to ignore insurance. That can be a smart approach.
If carriers don’t change, it’s likely government will soon change them. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) hospital price transparency final rule, which would require hospitals to “establish, update and make public a list of their standard charges for the items and services that they provide,” comes into effect this time next year. Carriers can continue to keep the prices they negotiate with hospitals secret for now, but not forever.
Being upfront and transparent about how and why they’ve come to agree on certain prices for certain services or procedures isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the inevitable. And those that get a head start on that now will be the ones to have a leg up on their competitors in the not-too-distant future.
