Site-neutral payment: Could price opacity give way to transparency?

The current administration’s latest health care blueprint was light on details when it was introduced. However, the emphasis on greater price transparency could be beneficial for the U.S. health care system. Christopher M. Whaley, Ph.D., associate professor, health services, policy and practice, and associate director of the Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research at Brown University, offers this first impression. He’s the co-author of a Health Affairs analysis of 2026 Medicare physician payment.

Medical Economics: President Donald Trump announced the Great Healthcare Plan. Did you have a chance to review that? And what's your first impression?

Christopher M. Whaley, Ph.D.: Like many people, I've had a chance to review it. I think right now, it's fairly light in details, and so I think that it will depend on how things actually shake out. But I do think that pushes towards more transparency in health care markets, whether it's prices, but I think also importantly, organizational structure is something that's very important.

Medical Economics: Why is price transparency so difficult to achieve in health care?

Christopher M. Whaley, Ph.D.: It's difficult to achieve because there's a lot of, at least in my opinion, institutional inertia against having price transparency, and so it's just not really how the health care industry in the United States has evolved over the last several decades, unlike basically every other industry in the country. I do think that's something that, with new data, is changing pretty rapidly. And I think it's kind of a question of what's the right use of price transparency, and so now that there's lots of price information, are patients going to be shopping for, say, every single procedure? I think that's probably less likely to happen. But I think a kind of more immediate use of price transparency is rather a kind of hub, if you will, that enables lots of other policy innovation. So whether it's, say, employers or purchasers deciding on network design or how to essentially audit prices negotiated by their insurers on their behalf, or regulators or researchers trying to understand how to make health care markets work better, I think that's kind of the first place where price transparency data will be used.