Hey Folks, I’m back! (Don’t ask where I’ve been, let’s just maintain the convenient fiction that I left my password in my other khakis and move on. Thank you.)
And I’m back with that all-time crowd-pleasing page-turner, HEALTH CARE POLICY!
But srsly folks, Peter Ubel, one of my favorite health care policy go-to guys (do yourself a favor and read his book Critical Decisions on the 21st century physician/patient relationship–it’s from 2012, you can pick it up for five bucks) has a great piece at forbes.com about reference pricing for reimbursement, and how it can save corporations a vast amount of money without hurting patients by eliminating some glaring inefficiencies in the market with no cost to quality of care. Ultimately, there is no reason on God’s Green Earth™ that the same blood test should cost $30 at one lab and $100 at the one next door. Scaling reimbursement to a benchmark is a tremendously simple way to eliminate inefficiency, cut cost, and not affect care. Your CBC’s gonna look the same if it’s done at Quest or LabCorp. And they’re pretty much all good.
“Reference pricing of laboratory tests created $3.6 million dollars of savings over three years, and that’s for a company insuring only 30,000 employees. In other words, they saved about $125 per employee.” Do the math, and see the link below.
Post A Reply