Healthcare prices – Clear Thinking on Healthcare

Helping Patients Choose Higher-Value Providers

Last week, I wrote about how quality metrics are misused by healthcare reformers. They’re almost exclusively tied to bonuses or penalties from insurers. In other words, they’re used to increase or decrease the price providers get paid. This is a form of administrative pricing, which is a super economically inefficient way to set prices. And I proposed the alternative use of quality metrics–to help patients choose higher-value providers.

We give people quality metrics and they seem to generally do a good job shopping for the best value in pretty much every other industry, which drives competition over value. So why do we fail so miserably in healthcare?

The first problem is that healthcare is missing the thing that motives people to shop around for the best value: their money is on the line. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago. We need people to pay a little more if they choose a higher-priced provider. But when prices are opaque or unknowable beforehand, or when their insurance plan makes them pay the same regardless of the provider’s price (or if the insurance plan is complex enough that the patient doesn’t understand that they’ll have to pay more if they choose a higher-priced provider), people don’t perceive that their money is on the line. In that last sentence, I just listed four issues preventing people from actually caring what the price is!

And then there are the issues of having only one option (like in a rural area) and non-shoppable services (like during emergencies) and non-shopping-when-you’re-already-established-with-a-provider. Yeah, there are a lot of reasons people don’t shop for prices in healthcare! But in spite of all that, there are some good studies that show that people will actually shop for services when all the stars align.

I know that even if people have a hard time knowing prices beforehand, they theoretically could still shop just as vigorously for the highest quality.

But I think there’s something that happens when people can’t shop for price that sorta stops them from thinking about shopping for quality too. I haven’t seen any studies that prove this, but I suspect it’s a thing.

So let’s talk about the people who say, “Well if I don’t know what I’m going to pay, I might as well try to find the best quality option.” They use a variety of sources since there isn’t one single well-known and useful quality source out there. Usually they rely on recommendations from their doctor or their friends and family. If that person had a good experience, that’s a reliable indicator of quality, right?

Or maybe they decide to be brave and try Googling quality metrics. They’ll find something, certainly. But chances are they’ll find quality metrics that aren’t super relevant to what they actually care about. For example, maybe they’ll discover Medicare’s Care Compare website. What does 3 stars even mean? Even drilling down, how useful is it to know that a hospital’s safety is “below the national average” in 2 out of 8 metrics? How does that get weighed against a high recommendation of the hospital from a family member? Or, is that quality rating ignored because the hospital’s lobby is spacious and it advertises meals prepared by well-known chefs?

Compare the relative uselessness of those quality metrics to the example of Seattle’s Virginia Mason Health System when they were redesigning their low-back pain care pathway. They figured out that people care most about how soon they can get back to work (it’s expensive to live in Seattle, if you didn’t know) and, among other changes, made same-day appointments available. This was the quality metric people cared about, and their low-back-pain market share doubled.

After reading all these barriers to people shopping for the best value in healthcare, I hope you can see that (1) this problem is perfectly explainable and (2) it’s totally fixable. Can someone please tell the Medicare administrators that most of their current efforts at “value-based purchasing” are going to be close to useless? And tell them to look at getting rid of some of these barriers to patients choosing high-value providers instead.

Another Article Shows that Price Transparency Tools Don’t Work (Plus My Explanation Why)

I have a bunch of papers I’ve saved to read, and I think it’s time to start going through them.

This one is called Online Advertising Increased New Hampshire Residents’ Use of Provider Price Tool But Not Use of Lower-Price Providers. It’s in Health Affairs, 2021, and was written by Sunita Desai, Sonali Shambhu, and Ateev Mehrotra. I always look forward to reading studies that Dr. Mehrotra was involved in.

Based on the title, you can guess that this paper will be good to challenge my assertions that people can make value-sensitive decisions if they are given the right information. Let’s see what they found!

The background to this study is that price transparency efforts are “plagued by low consumer engagement.” Typically less than 15% of people actually use whatever price transparency tool (usually a website) was provided, and often the number is much lower. So the question is, are so few people using these price transparency tools because they don’t know they exist, or is it for some other reason? Possible other explanations the researchers provide include patients just plain not being interested in using the price transparency information, and patients wanting to use the information but being unable to for some reason.

To answer their question, the researchers launched a “large targeted online advertising campaign using Googe Ads to increase awareness of and engagement with New Hampshire’s price transparency website.” Then, if the ads drove awareness of/traffic to the price transparency website but the claims data still did not reveal any changes in how often patients select lower-price providers, they could conclude that awareness isn’t the main contributor to the ineffectiveness of price transparency websites.

They created ads for three specific services: emergency department visits, physical therapy services, and imaging services, all chosen because they’re generally shoppable (yes, that includes emergency department visits, because the authors acknowledge that a high percentage of ED visits would be more amenable to urgent care!) and because their cost is typically low enough that people will not meet their deductible by receiving the service, which means they’ll usually be paying out of pocket for some percentage of the service.

The ads took people straight to the NH HealthCost website, which uses as its source data actual negotiated prices between provider-insurer diads (oh, the magic of all-payer claims databases!) (gag clauses be damned), although it doesn’t plug a patient’s exact plan or year-to-date spending info into the website to give an exact out-of-pocket cost; the best it can offer is an “estimate of procedure cost” and it also gives a “precision of the cost estimate” (low or high).

After spending $39,000 on ads over the course of 6 months, the website traffic went up from 265 visits/week to 1,931 visits/week. People who clicked on the ads spent, on average, about 30 seconds on the site. I just tried going to the site myself, and 30 seconds is definitely not enough time to truly search for a procedure and use the results to choose a provider. But maybe they returned later and spent more time on the website, which is plausible since the non-ad-related visitors typically spent more time than that.

Voila, awareness can drive traffic to a price transparency website! They cannot exactly calculate what percent of all patients who used one of those three services during the study period visited the website, but best-case estimations are 77% of ED visits, 13% of imaging services, and 54% PT visits. The true numbers may be much lower. But still, it’s enough that you’d think there would at least be some measurable difference if going to the website impacted provider selection.

Nope. Not at all. When compared to other states (as a control group, using a difference-in-differences analysis), there was absolutely no measurable impact on provider selection.

Before reading this paper, I was a little surprised at the title. But now, having read the paper and checked out the website myself, I’m not surprised.

Think about it this way: Have you ever compared Amazon prices on your phone when shopping at a brick-and-mortar store? I think a lot of us do that. Americans seem to be very interested in saving money and getting the best value as often as we can. But if we’re at Walmart and the best we can get when we pull up Amazon on our phones is, “This item will cost approximately $10 less than what you’re seeing right now in Walmart, and the precision of this estimate is low. Also, we can’t say anything useful about the quality of this product since there are no helpful reviews.” How influential do you think that would be for people? It almost seems like the risks of ending up with a more-costly or lower-quality product are high enough that you might as well go for the sure and familiar thing right in front of your face. I suspect it is the same with provider decisions.

The investigators summarized this perfectly when they said, “Our findings emphasize that awareness of prices does not simply translate into price shopping and lower spending. There are numerous barriers to using price information. People might not know the details of their benefit design to infer their out-of-pocket expenses. Customized out-of-pocket spending estimates may be critical.”

Agreed. They nailed it. And another thing is critical: easy-to-understand and relevant quality information. I’ve still never seen a real-world research study that’s been able to give patients both exact out-of-pocket prices and relevant quality information side by side. Those two details, plus insurance plan designs that require patients to pay more if they choose a higher-priced provider, are all essential to actually impacting patient decisions about where they will receive care.

Think of these efforts to get patients to alter their provider decisions as a bridge. This bridge has to span a deep chasm 30 metres wide. If the bridge uses three piles, each supporting a 10-metre long deck, the only way to cross to the other side is by having all three of those decks in place at the same time. Even if you build two of the three decks, almost nobody is going to cross that bridge. Likewise, very few patients will risk choosing a different provider than the default one (the nearest one, the one their friend recommended, the one their doctor mentioned, the one they’ve gone to before, etc.) unless they have all three of those pieces in place.

So, this study is useful in showing that awareness can drive a lot more traffic to shopping tools. That’s an important insight. But it was not designed to be a test of how much giving patients all three decks of that bridge will impact their provider selections. I doubt I will ever see a significant change in provider selection as a result of a price transparency effort until patients have all three of those required pieces of information at the same time. Which makes me mourn all over again that CMS did not fund the study I designed for the Utah Department of Health. It would have been the first to build that bridge and then watch what happens to patients’ provider selection and prices and quality in the market.

Why Does GoodRx Exist, and How Does It Work

Stacks of GoodRx cards sent to me at my place of employment

Last week, I wrote about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which are the companies that insurers contract with to help them create and manage their drug formularies. These PBMs also have significant power in the market as the ones who, to a fair extent, influence which prescriptions patients get because they control the patient’s copay for each medicine, so they take advantage of that by getting kickbacks from manufacturers to make those manufacturers’ drugs cheaper for patients.

And now PBMs come into play again this week as we look at GoodRx. The most useful source I found when reading about GoodRx is right on the company’s website, an FAQ for pharmacy staff. Also, this review of their public filings was very helpful.

First, what is GoodRx? It’s a company that offers a free prescription card that patients can use to get discounts on their medications, and you can check what the discounted price will be at pharmacies in your area. (They’ve since branched out now into subscription programs and telehealth, but I’ll focus on their original line of business here.) GoodRx prescription discount cards don’t work in addition to insurance; rather, you either buy the medication through your insurance plan or you pay without insurance and use a GoodRx card to get a better price.

I have no financial interest in GoodRx, but it seems like a no-brainer for anyone who is about to buy a medication through insurance to ask how much their copay will be and then pull up the GoodRx app right then and there to see if any local pharmacies can offer the med cheaper through GoodRx (and, according to a couple journalists who tried that, they got a cheaper price through GoodRx about 40% of the time for the most commonly prescribed medications). Just remember though that the money spent on medications when using GoodRx does not count toward your deductible.

It makes sense that there would be a website/app that lists the prices of medications at multiple pharmacies so patients can price shop, but what’s with these discount card prices being lower than the cash prices?

Pharmacies, in their contracts with PBMs, will not get paid more than their list price. So, to avoid missing out on money that PBMs would be perfectly willing to pay them, they make sure to set their list price (i.e., cash price) higher than what any contracted price with a PBM will be. So you should expect cash prices to always be higher than the price you’ll get by going through your insurer, although I’m sure this rule is broken sometimes. Because it’s American healthcare.

On the GoodRx website/app, the prices shown are not cash prices though. They’re the actual prices that pharmacies have contracted with PBMs. These prices vary significantly from pharmacy-PBM contract to pharmacy-PBM contract, mostly because of the complexity and sheer number of different medications that they are negotiating over, which means they cannot possibly negotiate over every individual medication, so instead they negotiate over groups of medications. This means some medications in that group will end up being cheaper than they would otherwise be, and others in that group will end up being more expensive.

This is summed up nicely in a quote by GoodRx co-founder, Doug Hirsch: “We said, let’s see if we can gather all these prices and see if we can exploit the variation in these contracts.”

But this means pharmacies are stuck selling medications to tons of people at prices that they accidentally undervalued in a negotiation with a single PBM. Sure, short of adding a gag clause to their contract, they can’t stop the PBM from sharing that price with GoodRx, but why in the world would pharmacies ever agree to let tons of other patients not even covered by that PBM walk out with a medicine for that same undervalued price?

They actually don’t have a choice. PBMs require in their contracts with pharmacies to accept the GoodRx discount card price. GoodRx does try to make pharmacies feel better about it by saying that “once patients are in the pharmacy, they are also more likely to purchase non-prescription items at the store.” Ok great, so the medication turns into a forced loss leader.

There’s one more big piece to this puzzle. Why would PBMs go along with GoodRx in the first place? Think about it from their perspective. They are angering pharmacies by forcing acceptance of GoodRx as part of their contracts, and they are the ones sharing all their contracted prices with GoodRx and then left looking bad after patients find out their PBM didn’t get the best negotiated price on a large minority of medications. In short, what’s in it for the PBMs?

Money. I suspect the PBM is getting a cut of every transaction that uses GoodRx because the PBM is the one adjudicating the claim. They’re also giving a cut of it to GoodRx as a reward for bringing them the extra claim.

PBMs and GoodRx both seem to win, as do patients if they’re finding lower prices. So if GoodRx is actually decreasing prescription spending, where is the money coming from? There’s only one party left. Pharmacies must be the ones taking the loss. I wonder if that loss-leader argument actually makes pharmacies more than they are losing on this whole venture. My suspicion is that it’s hard to prove one way or the other, but I doubt it.

The Political Philosophy of Pricing

Let’s get into a little bit of political philosophy. Here’s my logic flow that sets the context for this discussion. This is my first crack at laying this out, so I hope it is easy to follow:

An efficient economy is desirable because it raises the general standard of living, which can help more people escape from the limiting effects of poverty.
An efficient economy is one that enables resources to be put to the best use.
Prices are central to helping resources be put to their best use. Only market-generated prices can accurately convey the true and current value of something, as explained by all the following points.
The market-generated price of something is determined by (1) the cost of all the inputs and (2) people’s willingness to pay.
1. The cost of all the inputs is determined by the price at which those inputs are being sold by suppliers. And those suppliers are setting their prices according to the same two factors (the cost of their inputs and people’s willingness to pay).
2. People’s willingness to pay is an aggregation of the different potential buyers how much that input is worth to each of them, which depends on if there are substitutes and, if so, the relative price and quality of those substitutes for their specific use case.
The numerous supplier-buyer diads, taken together, form a supply chain, and at each link in the chain there are prices being set in accordance with those same two factors.
New uses for resources are constantly being developed, and the availability and procurement cost of resources are also constantly changing, all of which have ripple effects on the prices of all other resources in the economy as mediated by changes in those two factors that determine market-generated prices.

I’m sure that logic flow will need to be clarified and changed, but it is a start at least. And the conclusion of it, at least as it relates to administrative pricing, is that there is no way a group of experts could ever acquire enough information to accurately determine the proper efficient-economy price for a single product at any point in time, let alone constantly adjust that price over time to take into account the ever-changing factors in every locality.

The way Friedrich Hayek said it in his seminal paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society, is that “the knowledge of the circumstance of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” And, therefore, “Prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.”

He gives an example of this using the tin market, showing what would happen when suddenly there arises a new use for tin:

“All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.”

I do not think people argue that administrative pricing is as efficient as relying on market-generated prices. But from this it should be clear that those two prices are going to end up being wildly different from each other most of the time, and the challenge is to quantify the efficiency cost to the economy of that and then to weigh it against the estimated benefits of using administrative pricing.

Or, in cases where administrative pricing is being proposed in an attempt to curb our capitalistic society’s wealth inequalities, why not just use other methods to redistribute wealth and avoid administrative pricing’s efficiency costs on our economy altogether? This is what I’ve described in my examples of an optimal single-payer healthcare system and an optimal government-run healthcare system.

Who Can Fix Irrational Healthcare Spending?

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about an experience I had at work with a patient wanting to stay in the hospital for two extra days just so he could spend a few hours with his daughter from out of town before going to a skilled nursing facility where no visitors would be allowed. The cost of staying in the hospital those couple extra days was probably at least $4,000 total, but the patient and his family were (rationally) ignoring that cost because they weren’t going to have to pay for any of it directly themselves.

The solution I proposed to such system-level irrational spending was to have the person making the purchase decision bear at least part of the cost of that decision. That way, if they choose something more expensive, it will be done with a consideration for the additional cost that choice entails.

As context for my proposed solution to such a problem, remember three things: (1) every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, (2) the design of a system generates a set of incentives, and (3) incentives are what drive the results of every system. So does no one have an incentive to get the people making purchase decisions to bear at least part of the price differential?

This is how I look at it:

Anything that lowers the total cost of care (while at least holding quality constant) is desirable for whoever is bearing the burden of that total cost of care. And the parties who bear that burden are the insurer and the patient, to varying degrees.

But since the patient typically doesn’t have much of an idea about what their out-of-pocket cost will be or how those costs will be impacted by choosing a different procedure or a different provider, they are not in a position to do anything about it.

The insurer, on the other hand, has the capacity to know–or at least give a reasonable estimate of–the cost of something. Therefore, we need to look to insurers for the necessary changes.

But think about this proposal from an insurer’s perspective . . .

The young energetic intern pitches such a plan to the executives, “Hey, how about we offer a new and innovative insurance plan that gets rid of the typical deductible and instead makes enrollees pay a 50% coinsurance on each service they receive (subject to their out-of-pocket max, of course). We could set the total price of each service (and, therefore, their coinsurance portion) at our negotiated rates with each provider. And we’ll make an app that will allow them to compare prices beforehand.”

The room’s executives would immediately see all the problems with such a plan. “This is too complicated for people! They will hate it and never want to get an insurance plan from us again.” “We can’t divulge our negotiated rates, all the providers who find out they are getting paid less will be angry and demand more from us.” “What about things that are not shoppable?” “If a single bad publicity event comes out of this experiment, it will severely damage our reputation and we’ll lose market share as a result, so we stand to lose more than we could gain.” “We’re going to have to make premiums extra low for such a plan to be able to convince people to try it out, but there’s no way to easily communicate how this plan is different, so a lot of people will just choose it because it’s cheap and says it has a $0 deductible and then they won’t be prepared to pay all their coinsurance costs.” “What about out-of-network coinsurance rates?” “Nobody’s ever done something like this before, so it’s too crazy to try unless we are likely to make a killing on it, which we aren’t.”

I talked about these same issues in my Why Insurers Don’t Innovate post a year ago. And not all of them are immediately solveable. But if we could address at least a majority of those executives’ concerns, I believe we would start seeing some enterprising insurers try this out.

The big thing would be solving the novel complexities that such a plan would create and then finding a way to convey this information to potential enrollees, either in the health insurance marketplace or in employer benefits explanations. And we would have to hope that many people would be willing to use an app to check healthcare prices in compensation for paying a much lower premium.

There would be lots of challenges to solve, and apparently no insurer has yet determined that the potential benefits are worth the potential harms. But I have hope that this will happen and be successful sooner or later. Maybe if the first enterprising insurer to try it can identify some first-mover advantages and create some barriers to imitation, they would stand to gain a lot more.

Also, remember there’s the static-world benefits to patients making value-sensitive decisions (they get better deals on the care they buy), and then there’s the dynamic-world benefits (the market starts to evolve toward delivering higher value). This kind of insurance plan design change, as it starts and then spreads, will enact a big change in providers’ incentives. In other words, the system will be fundamentally changed, which will result in much higher value care being delivered as it evolves in response to that change.

Sneaky Hospital Tactics to Force Higher Prices

Image credit: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

There was a recent 60 Minutes episode with a segment that talked about why healthcare prices are so high, and I learned a couple new things.

The segment focused on Sutter Health, which is a large healthcare system in Northern California. Sutter Health was the bad guy in this episode, but the American Hospital Association dutifully provided a counter-argument to the story here.

For context, remember that the price negotiations between hospitals and insurers are not based on costs but rather bargaining power. The more bargaining power the hospital has over the insurer, the higher the prices they win.

Here is Sutter Health’s strategy to win more bargaining power, according to the 60 Minutes segment:

First, buy up other hospitals to become a monopoly in as many markets as possible. If you cannot be a complete monopoly somewhere, find a way to become a monopoly over a key service line, such as maternity care. Next, require two things in every contract you make with an insurer–a gag clause (so nobody can divulge the prices agreed upon) and an all-or-nothing clause (so the insurer has to have all the system’s hospitals and services in network or none of them).

The combination of all that leads to the hospital having much greater bargaining power.

How?

The insurers are kind of forced to have Sutter Health in their networks to avoid having important gaps in coverage (either a regional gap if the one hospital in that county isn’t in network, or a service-specific gap if Sutter Health is the only provider of that service in an area). They leverage that foot in the door with the all-or-nothing clause, so now basically every insurer is compelled to include every Sutter Health hospital, so Sutter Health can demand very high prices and get away with it. And, for Sutter Health’s protection against the bad PR they would get by charging such high prices, they have the gag clauses in place.

Pretty clever I’d say. Unfortunately for them, the government tends to notice when a hospital system becomes a monopoly in multiple ways, and they also notice when a hospital system is making a lot more money than others around it. So they get investigated, reporters dig up the juicy story, and the government slaps a few wrists with lawsuits and new regulations.

Is there a better, long-term solution to these tactics? I have a few thoughts on the matter. First, there’s nothing like monopoly rents to draw competition to a market, so allowing healthcare entrepreneurs to enter those monopolized markets/service lines would be a great start. And if Sutter Health’s competitor hospitals start doing some thorough cost accounting, they could know how much their different services cost and be able to start setting competitive “out-of-network prices.” When those competitors start winning market share, Sutter Health will have to respond with lower prices and more price transparency to become competitive again themselves.

So many market failures are solved by price transparency.

Building a Healthcare System from Scratch, Part 5: Getting Market Share to Flow to Higher-value Options

We established in prior parts of this series that, in this Healthcare Incentives Framework, there are specific identifiable jobs we want a healthcare system to do for us, and that there are parties that have incentives to perform those jobs for us. The focus then turned to how to get those parties to perform those jobs in ways that maximize value, which we saw is achieved by rewarding them with more profit when they perform their jobs in higher-value ways. And in Part 4, we saw that the only effective way to do that is by getting market share to flow to the higher-value options. In this post, we examine what needs to happen for people to choose those higher-value options.

There are three requirements that all must be in place at the same time to enable someone to choose the highest-value option:

Requirement 1: Multiple options. This one seems straightforward–no market share can flow anywhere if there is only one option available. But there is another, less obvious aspect of this. Parties also need the freedom to vary their price and quality in ways that create unique value propositions, otherwise they will all look pretty similar, so the effective options people have would be severely limited, even if the total number of options is not. For example, if there is a price floor created by some administrative pricing mechanism, it will prevent any innovation that lowers quality a little bit but significantly lowers price. Why? Because those parties contemplating that kind of innovation will know that, without the ability to offer prices significantly lower than their competitors, they will be unable to win the market share necessary to make their innovation profitable.

Requirement 2: Ability to identify the highest-value option. Remember that value is determined by two things: quality and price. People choosing from among multiple providers or insurers need to be able to compare, apples to apples, the quality and price of all their options before they select one. But having apples-to-apples comparable price and quality information is not enough. The quality information would have to be simple enough to be easily understood and also relevant to the specific dimensions of quality people actually care about. And price information would need to reflect the expected total price of the product or service, otherwise it’s mostly useless. Both quality and price can be challenging in healthcare, which creates barriers to people being able to identify the highest-value option, but those barriers will be discussed in part 6 of this series.

Requirement 3: Incentive to choose the highest-value option. Even if people have multiple options and are able to easily tell which is the highest-value option, they will not choose that highest-value option without the right incentives. This applies to both their insurance plan selection and their care providers selection. Consider this example about choosing the highest-value care provider: suppose a patient has the choice to have a procedure at a nearby world-renowned hospital (95% success rate, $80,000) or the local community hospital (92% success rate, $40,000). Further suppose that this patient will pay $10,000 out of pocket (their annual out-of-pocket max) regardless of which hospital they choose. Which will they choose? An additional 3% chance of success for an extra $40,000 seems steep, but since they’re not paying the difference, most people would go for the world-renowned hospital regardless of the difference. Extracting the principle from this example, people need to pay more when they choose a higher-priced provider (or less when they choose a lower-priced provider); this doesn’t necessarily mean they always need to pay the complete difference between the two, but they at least need to pay some of that difference. Same goes for the quality aspect of value. If someone other than the patient (say, the insurance company) is choosing where the patient will receive care, they generally care a lot more about the price than about the quality differences between the options since they aren’t the one who bears the consequences of going to a lower-quality option. So, in summary, regardless of whether the discussion is about choosing providers or choosing insurance plans, the individual making purchase decisions needs to bear the price and quality consequences of the decision.

By now it should be clear that if any of these three criteria are not fulfilled, market share will not flow to the highest-value options, and the whole incentive scheme we are creating falls apart.

There are, you may have figured, many many barriers to these things working in current healthcare systems, some of which would be present even in our optimal healthcare system we are building. But that’s the topic of Part 6.

How to Change How Prices Are Set in Healthcare

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.”

The Three Different Ways We Could Set Prices in Healthcare

Image credit: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

Out of the three general ways we could set prices in our healthcare system, one is best. Too bad we’re using the other two.

First, I’ll describe each method:

Administrative pricing: This one is very straightforward. The government says, “For procedure A, healthcare providers will be paid X dollars.” Usually the methods for coming up with that dollar amount are sophisticated and rely on the best available data, but not always because they are subject to various political influences and government budgets.
Bargaining power-based pricing: This one is easiest to explain using an example. Think of a small town with only two family medicine docs. One, Dr. Awesome, treats 90% of the town’s residents; the other, Dr. Mediocre, treats the other 10%. All patients are insured by one of four different private insurers, each of which has approximately equal market share. Now think of Dr. Awesome sitting down at the bargaining table with one of the insurers to decide on prices. He says, “If you don’t pay me at least Medicare rates times 1.4, I won’t accept your insurance. I’m serious, I won’t accept anything less.” And the insurer says, “Hey, that’s a horrible deal, but if we stop covering care you provide then most of our policy holders in your town will just switch to one of our three competitors and we’d lose out on even more profit!” Now think of the conversation between Dr. Mediocre and that same insurer. Dr. Mediocre says, “Pay me Medicare rates times 1.4.” And the insurer responds, “No. We’ll pay you Medicare times 0.8. If you say no and we don’t have you listed as a provider in our network anymore, that’s okay because only a tiny percentage of our policy holders are your patients. And we know that you don’t have many patients, so you can’t afford to risk losing 1/4 of them by saying no to the price we offer.” Relative market share between the two parties is the primary determinant of bargaining power, so a bigger market share means you can get a better price.*
Competitive pricing: This is the method used to determine prices in almost every other industry. Here’s basically how it plays out: Competitor A says, “Everyone knows that our product has similar quality to our competitor’s product, so we can’t price it higher than theirs without sacrificing quite a bit of market share. We could sell it for less than theirs to win more market share, but then the price is perilously close to our costs, so we’ll have to do some math to see what the profit-maximizing price/market share combination is likely to be.” Note the one huge condition that is required for this to work: Potential customers must be able to compare the price and quality of all their options, which is starting to happen more and more as better quality information is starting to become available and as prices are becoming more transparent.

Our healthcare system currently relies primarily on number 1 (think: Medicare and Medicaid) and number 2 (think: private insurers and providers setting prices with each other). But which method is best?

If you want to have the lowest possible prices, administrative pricing is the obvious best choice. But that’s only for the short term (as you’ll see), and it does nothing to encourage quality improvement unless you start getting into the treacherous area of performance incentives.

The only thing I’ll say about bargaining power-based pricing is that I don’t like it. I’d rather not have prices that are totally unrelated to costs or quality and instead are determined by relative market share.

Now let me tell you why I like competitive pricing so much. I want our healthcare system to deliver better value right now (Value = Quality / Price), and even more than that I want that value to go up over time as providers and insurers innovate in ways that allow them to decrease prices, increase quality, or both. Competitive pricing is the only method that provides an incentive for competitors to innovate because it rewards the highest-value offerings with increased market share and profit. The other two options don’t do that, which seems like a pretty big downside, don’t you think? I’d be willing to forgo short-term super-low administratively set prices in favor of stimulating innovation that will improve value way more over the long term.

In my next post, I’ll explain how we can shift from bargaining power-based pricing to competitive pricing.

* Do you ever hear those arguments that if public insurers lower their prices any more, providers will just raise their prices for private insurers? Well, now you know why those arguments are mostly hogwash. Providers are already leveraging their relative market share to get as high prices as possible from private insurers, and getting paid less by public insurers doesn’t change that relative market share.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: