In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, an oncologist and a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, and Victor R. Fuchs, PhD, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University and former president of the American Economics Association, argue that price transparency won't significantly reduce healthcare costs.
Drs. Emanuel and Fuchs said that while arguments have been made that price transparency for tests and treatments will encourage patients to shop for lower-cost services, and in turn save money on healthcare, price transparency demonstrations have not reduced care costs.
They cited various studies to illustrate this, including one by Harvard Medical School researchers in which hundreds of thousands of employees were given access to their out-of-pocket costs with particular physicians and hospitals on a website but failed to translate that information into dollars saved. They said there were also no savings found in a follow-up study using another set of employers and a different tool.
"The fact is, price transparency will not make healthcare costs 'go way, way down,'" as President Donald Trump claimed it would earlier this year when he signed an executive order pushing disclosure, they wrote.
"Health insurance insulates the patient from price. Over 80 percent of the cost of medical care is paid by private and public insurance. Patients have little incentive to seek out the cheapest provider. When pricing websites exist, few patients use them. Even in the most favorable studies, when offered a price transparency tool, only 12 percent of patients took advantage of it; usually it's less than 4 percent of patients."
Read the full opinion piece here.
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