Relentless Health Value

There’s lots going on these days with transparency. Three cost transparency rules, as a matter of fact, just came out of CMS, for example. These rules demand that hospitals and payers make available cost information so patients can shop and employers can also shop. That last part there, about employers and/or payers being able to shop … that might wind up actually being the part of these transparency rules that has the most impact.   It all goes back to kind of a first-principle assumption that many made—including me, by the way—which is turning out to be arguable. It’s the great hope for consumerism through high-deductible health plans. The thought originally was that by pushing the burden onto patients/employees to find high-quality care at a fair price, we assumed that health care delivery would level up. We assumed that prices would come down, driven by the weight of consumer demands. But anybody seeking to validate this hypothesis would be pretty hard pressed to claim any sort of broad-stroke success bey