In my previous post, I described the three ways prices can be set in healthcare: administrative pricing, bargaining power-based pricing, and competitive pricing. I also bemoaned the fact that the prices paid to providers by private insurers are determined more by relative market share than by anything else* . . . but this post explains how we can change all that.
I see two possible pathways from bargaining power-based pricing to competitive pricing, so here they are.
First Pathway
Let’s pretend a colonoscopy clinic is super innovative in how they do things, and they eventually are able to lower their costs by 20%. This is great for them because the prices they are paid by insurers has stayed the same (remember, those prices are determined primarily by relative market share, not costs), so now they have a really solid profit margin. And yet, the managers of this clinic still aren’t satisfied because they have excess capacity they want to fill.
One day, the managers come up with an idea. They say, “Up to this point, we’ve always maximally leveraged our bargaining power with insurers to win the highest prices we possibly can, but what if we do something radically different? What if we offer to lower our prices by 10% in exchange for the insurers putting us in a new, lower-copay tier? This would induce way more of their policy holders to choose us for their colonoscopies, so we’ll fill up our excess capacity. And, according to our calculations, our increased volume will more than make up for the lower prices. So everyone wins! Our profit increases, the insurer saves money with the lowered prices, and the patients are happy because their copays are less as well.”
Soon, some of the clinic’s competitors would figure out why their volume is starting to drop, so they would probably find a way to offer lower prices to get put into that lower-copay tier as well. Competitors who can’t or won’t lower prices will slowly lose market share until they, too, are forced to either lower price or improve quality enough to convince patients that going to them is worth the extra money.
Voila! Competitive pricing.
I have a friend who manages a large self-insured employer’s insurance plan, and I asked him what he would do if a clinic came to him offering lower prices in exchange for steering more employees to it. He said as long as the provider can show that quality won’t go down with the additional volume and that wait times for appointments won’t increase, he’d probably go for it.
Now, of course this wouldn’t work with every kind of healthcare service. I purposely chose a non-emergency service that already has pretty straightforward pricing. But as a priori quality and pricing information becomes more available, more services will be candidates for this pathway to competitive pricing.
One other point: Hospitals generally do a horrible job of cost accounting (they’re just such complex organizations!), so they usually have no idea if a proposed price reduction will still be profitable or not. Thus, they’ll be left behind in this game until they start to develop better cost accounting methods. If they have some foresight, they’ll start fixing that now.
Second Pathway
An insurer is despairing the fact that many of the providers in the region have combined into a single price-negotiating group, so now the insurer is stuck paying way higher prices than before. But then some health policy-savvy managers figure out a solution. They say, “Let’s implement reference pricing for a bunch of non-emergency, straightforward services. Let’s start with colonoscopies. This is how it works. We’ll tell our policy holders that we’ll put $1,200 toward a colonoscopy (the “reference price”). If a policy holder chooses a provider who charges more than that, they will pay everything over that price. A few clinics in the area offer prices that are lower than $1,200, so policy holders will still have a few options if they don’t want to pay a dime. But, (and here’s the best part) the price the providers in that huge price-negotiating group forced us to accept is $3,000, so they’re definitely going to lose a lot of volume, which will probably force them to lower their price.”
Soon other insurers jump on the reference pricing bandwagon and higher-priced providers who are losing tons of volume will be forced to price competitively.
In conclusion, shifting to competitive pricing is not immediately possible with most healthcare services. But the way to make more healthcare services amenable to competitive pricing is to improve a priori quality and pricing information: quality information needs to be standardized and more relevant to the factors patients should be considering when they’re choosing between providers, and the full price of an episode of care needs to be available beforehand so patients can compare them apples to apples. Only after these changes happen will we be able to rely more on competitive pricing, which, most importantly, will do more to stimulate value-improving innovations in our healthcare system than almost anything else.
* I also complained about how administrative prices don’t encourage (and actually stifle) innovation toward higher quality and lower prices. Check out the Uwe Reinhardt quote in this blog post and then think, “Uwe must have been reading Taylor’s blog.”
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 