Federal regulations require hospitals and insurers to publish negotiated prices. States are also playing a role in this effort by monitoring compliance with the federal rules and implementing other policies to educate consumers and improve this cost-containment tool. In their recent Health Affairs Forefront article, Maanasa Kona and Nadia Stovicek look at state actions to promote price transparency.
On October 3, CHIR held the first in a series of in-person policy briefings on the future of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), sponsored by Arnold Ventures and West Health. The event, featuring remarks from U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan and a panel discussion moderated by Sarah Kliff of The New York Times, spotlighted state cost containment policies and employer strategies to inform the federal policy process concerning ESI, which covers almost half of all Americans.
Consumers are increasingly being exposed to a new expense when they seek outpatient medical care: hospital facility fees. In a new report and issue brief supported by West Health, CHIR’s Christine Monahan, Karen Davenport, and Rachel Swindle explore outpatient facility fee billing in the commercial sector, including the impact of these fees on consumers and how states are responding.
The rising costs of employer-sponsored insurance are placing financial pressure on employers and workers alike. In a four-part series, CHIR experts have reviewed the evidence supporting a range of policy options to improve the affordability this critical coverage option. This, their fourth and final post in the series, focuses on health care price transparency.
April showers bring May flowers, and May was abloom with health policy research. Last month, we read about the impact of ending pandemic-related coverage policies, consumer awareness of the resumption of Medicaid renewals, and approaches to tackling rising health care costs in commercial health insurance markets.
The midterm elections are upon us, and most voters view health care as a “very important” issue. Republican House members have put out a health policy agenda through their Healthy Future Task Force. CHIR’s Rachel Schwab looks at several of the task force’s affordability recommendations.
Hospitals and health insurers are now required to publicly post their prices for health care services. However, as Maanasa Kona and Sabrina Corlette observe in their latest Health Affairs Forefront blog, the new disclosure requirements have not – yet – translated into data that can be used to identify the drivers of health care cost growth. Their piece identifies options for federal and state regulators to improve compliance and ultimately help support informed health care purchasing and policy decisions.
Federal law now requires hospitals to publish the prices they negotiate with private insurers, yet many of them are not complying. In this post for the Health Affairs Blog, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette and Maanasa Kona and Marilyn Bartlett of the National Academy for State Health Policy discuss ways that state health benefit purchasers, such as state employee plans, can help increase hospital compliance.
Amidst high and rising health care costs, recent federal regulations require hospitals and health plans to publicly post their prices. Such data can be useful for those seeking to control costs and improve affordability, but lack of compliance with the new requirements and data accessibility have made analysis difficult. To gain insights into the potential for this data and generate ideas for how to optimize the information to help reduce health system costs, CHIR convened a meeting of health care researchers, purchasers, and insurance regulators from around the country.
This September, CHIR’s Nia Gooding reviewed new studies on state health system performance, differences in health care spending between Medicare and private payers, and deceptive insurance marketing practices.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
