Health gains from key prescription drugs.
Steve Henke, et. al., skewer a new Royal Society report on Covid-19.
Health Affairs study: employers lack leverage to negotiate lower prices. Have they never heard of reference pricing?
CDC: we are losing the battle against obesity. I thought we lost it a long time ago.
Inequities at the doctors office: is it because the patients don’t speak up for themselves?
Thanks for the note on reference pricing….
I was really hopeful when this concept came out, but by all indications it has never taken off.
Based on my study, here are the reasons:
1. It makes the patient do a LOT more work. The patient has to find out the price of care in his favorite hospital/clinic, then he/she has to contact other providers and get their price, (no easy task).
2. If the patient just lets things play out, they could face a large balance bill.
If his/her usual hospital charges $20,000 but the reference price is $10,000, the insurer might just pay $10,000 and the patient would get a balance bill for the rest.
You can be assured that other people in the company will hear about the patient’s anger.
3. For all this P.R. risk, the savings may not be very large. Yes, an employer can save money on imaging through reference pricing. And yes, an employer can save money on relatively non-urgent procedures like knee replacement.
Some employers will not find such savings are worth the possible employee anger from reference pricing.