Three of the major health insurance companies in the U.S. have agreed to post their health care prices in an online portal in early 2015. The move aims to boost transparency in the health care system of a country infamous for its seemingly random and high prices.
Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare will start providing customers free online access to a comprehensive information portal about the quality and price of their services. This will allow customers to compare prices and make more informed decisions in the government's effort to regulate health care costs, which account for almost 20 percent of the country's economy at $2.7 trillion per year.
"Consumers, employers and regulatory agencies will now have a single source of consistent, transparent health-care information based on the most reliable data available, including actual costs, which only insurers currently have," Health Care Cost Institute Executive Director David Newman said. "Voluntarily making this information available will be of immeasurable value to consumers and other health system participants as they seek to manage the cost and quality of care."
HCCI will manage and maintain the online portal for health care information in a highly protected and secure system. Other health insurance companies are also interested and HCCI expects more companies to participate soon. The transparency tool will gather pricing information from commercial health companies and Medicare Advantage and Medicaid plans if individual states will share this information. This initiative succeeds other efforts by the Obama administration to post cost information as part of its Affordable Care Act.
The transparency tool is very important because more patients have high-deductible plans. There are plans with deductibles as high as $5,000 to $6,000 a year under the exchanges. There is also an increasing trend with employer plans that have high deductibles.
The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services released a list in 2013, putting in detail the cost most hospitals in the U.S. charge for 100 of the most common inpatient treatments and procedures. In April 2014, federal health authorities posted Medicare billing files of around 880,000 doctors. The information showed the country's wide disparities of health care pricing, even in the same region, and the share of Medicare expenses that go to just a few providers.
