Colleague Larry van Horn's efforts to require negotiated prices between payers (insurance companies) and healthcare providers (doctors, hosptials) be made public are about to bear fruit. Larry showed that
Even when insurance covers the cost, there is, on average, a 300 percent price variation within a market for the exact same services.
As a special advisor to President Trump, Larry encouraged the President to force the bargaining pairs to make public their negotiated prices.
The first data is now trickling out and the NY Times seems to approve, and gives President Biden credit for not reversing Larry's efforts:The requirement to publish prices is a rare bipartisan effort: a Trump-era initiative that the Biden administration supports
MEA CULPA:
17 years ago, when I was Chief Economist at the FTC, I wrote a letter to the California legislature suggesting that price transparency would have the opposite effect. At the time, my thinking was that (i) transparent prices could facilitate collusion; and (ii) a provider would be more likely to accept a lower price if the provider did not have to disclose it to others. I was primarily concerned with protecting bargaining competition, and I didn't grasp the perverse incentives of the bargainers. As the NY Times notes:
The insurer also may not have a strong motivation to [negotiate lower prices], given that the more that is spent on care, the more an insurance company can earn.
Vanderbilt alum Richard Stephenson is quoted in the Times article and runs Redu Health, a "national self-pay discount network empowers employees and members ... with transparent, upfront pricing."
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