The number of people working for transparency in health care costs is growing. Drivers of this trend include the inexorable rise in costs, the results of that trend and the health reform bill the Obama administration fought so hard for. Here’s one take on the issue:
“…High health care costs create significant suffering for American families, businesses, and governments. Other leading nations spend half or less of what we do on health care, making it increasingly difficult for American families to retain their standard of living and for American businesses to compete in a global economy. ..
“Under the current system, patients and their doctors have neither the incentive nor the information needed to keep costs down. Perhaps more worrying, many patients equate higher prices with better care even when higher costs may be the result of complications and other dangerous variations.
“If experience from other industries holds true, most patients will not check with a value comparison tool before choosing a physician, hospital, or treatment. But as little as about 15 percent of consumers can shape a market. That’s in part because transparent markets tend to drive themselves to lower cost and higher quality across producers and across the continuum of services.” (Emphasis mine.)
The article, by Louise Probst of the St. Louis Area Business Health Coalition, was published on the blog of the Commonwealth Fund, which describes itself as “a private foundation working toward a high performance health care system.”
Why does health care cost so much, and what can we do about it? Well, for one, we can try to be better consumers. For another, we can encourage transparency.
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Jeanne Pinder is the founder and CEO of ClearHealthCosts. She worked at The New York Times for almost 25 years as a reporter, editor and human resources executive, then volunteered for a buyout and founded ClearHealthCosts.
With Pinder at the helm, ClearHealthCosts shared honors for the top network public service journalism project in a partnership with CBS News, as well as winning numerous other journalism prizes.
She was previously a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism. ClearHealthCosts has won grants from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York; the International Women’s Media Foundation; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with KQED public radio in San Francisco and KPCC in Los Angeles; the Lenfest Foundation in Philadelphia for a partnership with The Philadelphia Inquirer; and the New York State Health Foundation for a partnership with WNYC public radio/Gothamist in New York; and other honors.
She is one of Crain’s Notable Women in Tech. Niemanlab wrote of ClearHealthCosts that “The Internet hates secrets.”
Her TED talk about fixing health costs has surpassed 2 million views.