A panel exploring fixes to unwarranted differences in health care prices hit upon some consensus Tuesday as its members identified one of their chief hurdles as conveying useful, understandable cost information to patients.
The commission of lawmakers and health care industry leaders has just over nine weeks remaining to produce a report recommending ways the state might reduce price variation among health care providers. During a meeting Tuesday, members suggested a need for patients to have more information about what they’d pay for a procedure or service but said providing that often complex data in a beneficial way is not an easy task.
“Unless someone has the silver bullet answer on how to communicate to general people about how to go about this … I think more than anything probably our number one challenge is how we communicate to patients and to the consumer about how to make the best choices that are best for them,” said Sen. James Welch, who leads the commission with Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez.
As Massachusetts grapples to contain health care spending that continually exceeds state economic growth benchmarks, the panel is discussing ways to encourage patients to choose doctors and hospitals that charge comparatively lower prices, including tiered insurance networks and other incentives. To do so, commission members said, patients must first understand different costs they will face.
House Majority Leader Ronald Mariano said he believes “the avenue that the state can have the most impact on” is providing information “in a form that has been tested and is easily digested by the average people” so patients and consumers aren’t driven away from the process by a fear of getting bogged down in difficult details.
“It is a human nature issue,” Mariano said. “We need to do a better job holding people’s hands and getting them to the portals so that they will be comfortable, whether that’s with public service squads or literature out of the health centers and to the population that needs to be taken to the water to drink.”
Dr. David Torchiana, the president and CEO of Partners HealthCare, said that to be effective, any information presented would need to be “vetted from the standpoint of a relatively low common denominator.”
“Medical literacy, especially medical literacy among the elderly and the chronically ill, is an enormous barrier to the use of even mildly complex information,” he said. “And so it turns out, I think, that a lot of these transparency activities actually have their principal impact on the provider side of the world as opposed to on the consumer side of the world, because a lot of the materials – even though it’s organized in a way to make it as lucid as possible – it’s very hard to assimilate it and use it constructively.”
A subcommittee working on issues related to transparency will make its recommendations to the full commission at a future meeting. Its members are considering three pilot programs targeted separately at employers, at insurers and at the provider level to help patients better understand their bills, said Boston Medical Center president and CEO Kate Walsh.
After the meeting, Sanchez said he was pleased the commission was keeping the needs of patients “first and foremost” amid a “real hearty discussion” and expressed confidence the group would have a report ready for its March 15 deadline.
“Like everything, right, there’s a hill to climb and a hole to fall into, but I feel like everybody’s been so committed to this,” he said. “It feels good that they’re having that discussion.”
