[Reblog] Debunking myths designed to hinder price, quality transparency efforts

From the 18 May 2015 post from the Association of Health Care Journalists

When writing about transparency in health care prices and quality, journalists should expose the myths that health care providers promote. That’s the advice Francois de Brantes gave during a session on price and quality transparency at Health Journalism 2015 last month.

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Providers promote the false ideas that gathering accurate price and quality data is difficult, if not impossible, and that variations in price result from the severity of illness in populations, de Brantes explained. By debunking these myths, journalists would inform policymakers and the public that there are ways to calculate the prices of medical episodes of care accurately, and that price variation can be controlled. “Price varies because of the way physicians practice,” he said.

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Among those myths:

• Price is a trade secret
• Disclosing prices would impede the ability of health plans, hospitals and physicians to compete effectively
• Revealing prices enables collusion and thus violates antitrust law
• Publishing prices leads to higher health care costs.

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Both Quincy and Suzanne Delbanco (@SuzanneDelbanco), executive director of the Catalyst for Payment Reform, made the point that price and quality transparency are similar in that both seem simple but are in fact extremely complex topics to cover. Most consumers, for example, are unaware of such quality measures as hospital infection rates and the CAHPS Hospital Survey from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Quincy said.

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