COVID-19 could cure healthcare cost secrecy

In a conference room at the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence talked to a socially distant and partially masked group of business leaders about reopening the Sunshine State’s hospitality businesses. Flanked by Gov. Ron DeSantis and hotelier Harris Rosen, Pence listened as leaders from Universal, Disney and SeaWorld, and from the hotel, restaurant and convention industries shared their ideas and struggles.

As the executive director of a national trade organization working to advocate for America’s doctors and patients, I joined the 100 or so attendees as these top leaders shared big ideas on how to heal our COVID-19-wracked economy.

The non-partisan elephant in the room, however, was this question: Once we get Americans back to work safely, how do we tackle the nation’s bigger health problem — the crippling cost of health care? Coronavirus has rattled Americans to their core with fears for both their physical and financial wellbeing.

Ironically, with COVID may come the cure.

COVID has highlighted a key problem with our health-care system: Americans are afraid to seek health care because they don’t know what it will cost. No wonder. Before COVID-19, health-care costs were ruining the lives of far too many Americans. Two-thirds who declared bankruptcy had substantial unpaid medical bills, and cost concerns caused 64% to avoid needed medical care.

Now it’s worse. More than 35 million Americans are out of work. Many have lost insurance.

In no other industry do consumers go in with an open checkbook, not knowing the cost until after receiving the non-returnable services. But that happens every day in health care.

Harris Rosen, who has cut the price of health care for his 6,000 employees in half by providing care at his onsite clinic, said after the roundtable, “That would be like you checking into one of my hotels, which you think will cost $199 a night, but at the end I present you with a bill for $5,000, including charges for every time you talked to an employee or used your bathroom.”

Requiring hospitals to make their real cash and negotiated prices transparent would fix that. If health care functioned like other markets, patients would know the price of their care before they received it. They would be able to shop, compare, choose the best value and buy health care the way they buy cars, groceries or houses.

Yet, because of our opaque health-care system, they can’t.

Real price transparency would introduce competition into our dysfunctional healthcare market. When hospitals, insurers and doctors have to show prices, they will have to compete. Prices will drop fast.

In a recent survey, 91% of Americans said they would like to see the price of health care before they buy it. So why can’t we? Because on the other side of that statistic are those who profit from keeping patients in the dark.

Hospitals, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to make sure their secret negotiated prices stay hidden. The American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers Association and Blue Cross/Blue Shield have been among the top 10 lobbying spenders for the last 20 years.

Last year, after the president issued an executive order for health-care price transparency, the Department of Health and Human Services followed with a ruling requiring hospitals and doctors to post their cash prices and negotiated contracted rates in an accessible, readable format. (Currently, hospital price lists, if they exist, are hard to find, harder to decipher and don’t relate to prices consumers actually pay.)

In response, the hospitals sued. The AHA and other hospital groups said that requiring them to show their contracted prices would violate the First Amendment. Never mind that hospitals and insurers show these “secret” prices all the time in the statement of benefits patients get their care. We want them beforehand.

The administration and Congress are working on the next COVID relief package. Language that would make real price transparency the law is on the table.

Americans want it. The Trump administration wants it. Now it’s up to Congress. Despite how much money they get paid to vote otherwise, I hope they will support what 91% of Americans want.

If price transparency became part of the next stimulus package, that would end the lawsuit and be the beginning of a free market health-care system Americans have long been denied. And years from now we could talk about how our nation’s worst pandemic helped cure health care.