Provider Pricing: The Elephant in the Room

Most everyone agrees we spend too much on health care in this country with poor results. One of the main reasons for this high cost is what we pay providers for their services. And this may just get worse in the future as more and more providers consolidate and exert hteir power when negotiating fees. From the Health Affairs blog:

A growing imbalance between payers and providers. As MacGillis notes, the market imbalance between payers and providers may be getting worse due to increasing provider market and consolidation, a phenomenon that has been discussed by other Health Affairs authors. For example, in an April 2010 Health Affairs article focusing on market conditions in California, Robert Berenson, Paul Ginsburg, and Nicole Kemper wrote that “providers’ growing market power to negotiate higher payment rates from private insurers is the ‘elephant in the room’ that is rarely mentioned.” The authors warned that, unless precautions are taken, the Affordable Care Act’s push toward “accountable care organizations” and other integrated care models could increase prices:

If accountable care organizations lead to more integrated provider groups that are able to exert market power in negotiations—both by encouraging providers to join organizations and by expanding the proportion of patients for whom provider groups can negotiate rates—private insurers could wind up paying more, even if care is delivered more efficiently.

Republicans, who seem poised to make big gains in next week’s elections, have argued for shifting more power in health care decision making, and more risk, to consumers. That would “only make the fundamental imbalance of information, power, and expertise” in favor of providers even worse, Vladeck said in his presentation at the Health Affairs event.

Berenson, Ginsburg, and Kemper concluded: “Unless market mechanisms can be found to discipline providers’ use of their growing market power, it seems inevitable that policy makers will need to turn to regulatory approaches, such as putting price caps on negotiated private-sector rates and adopting all-payer rate setting.” In the September-October 2009 Health Affairs issue, Robert Murray, executive director of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, wrote that had the state’s all-payer rate-setting system for hospitals been adopted nationwide, it might have saved $1.8 trillion over three decades.