Many of us are lulled into the rhetoric coming from hospitals and health systems that they must increase their prices for private payers because of inadequate reimbursements from public payers, such as Medicaid and Medicare. To some degree, this may well be the case. After all, hospitals and health systems need to generate enough revenue to offset costs to keep their doors open.

But this argument may not be as iron-clad as we were led to believe. Case in point: A recent report by the RAND Corporation about hospital prices paid by private health plans and how they compare with Medicare payments.

Findings of RAND Corp. Study

This is the third consecutive year that RAND Corp. has analyzed medical claims to determine how much private insurers pay for inpatient and outpatient hospital services. The most recent year of claims data analyzed was from 2018, which is about a two-year data lag.

Due to lack of medical price transparency, the sad commentary is that for private hospital prices to be discovered, hospital claims must be thoroughly analyzed to determine the ‘game of horseshoes’ on the prices being charged and paid by private health insurers and large self-funded employers who voluntarily share their claims data with RAND. In return, RAND then compares these prices to similar medical procedures that are paid to the same health providers by Medicare. With this information, private payers can attempt to negotiate better deals with the provider community.

This most recent report concluded that private insurers paid hospitals on average 247 percent of what Medicare would have paid for the same service in 2018. This gap is up from 230 percent in 2017 and 224 percent in 2016. To put this another way, if private payers from this study had paid hospitals at Medicare rates, they would have paid $19.7 billion less between 2016 to 2018 – a potential savings of 58 percent.

Here’s the Kicker

The RAND study’s lead author, Christopher Whaley, indicated that if hospitals are truly up-charging based on being shorted by Medicare and Medicaid, he would have expected to see hospitals with more Medicare/Medicaid patients charging private payers more, and those with fewer public patients charging less. But he found no correlation. His assessment is that “…sometimes hospitals charge high prices because they have the reputation or the quality or the market dominance to charge high prices…”.

All good reasons on why hospitals desire to keep prices opaque from private payers.

In addition to prices, the RAND Corp. also determined whether higher prices correlated with higher CMS star ratings and better safety scores from The Leapfrog Group. The findings show that high-quality hospitals with low and medium prices do exist, and it’s up to employers to implement tactics like narrow networks or reference pricing to steer employees to these high-value facilities.

Criticism by the American Hospital Association (AHA)

The AHA issued a Fact Sheet in January 2020, indicating that in 2018, Medicare paid hospitals 87 for every dollar that hospitals spent treating Medicare patients. For Medicaid patients, the AHA said that hospitals received 89 cents.

As frequently as the RAND Corp. releases studies on private hospital prices, the AHA equally releases statements refuting these findings.  AHA Executive Vice President Tom Nickels recently stated that the RAND report “again perpetuates erroneous suggestions that Medicare payments should be used as a benchmark for private insurers…”. Nickels also suggests that the claims analyzed represents a “handpicked sample of employers and insurers” that are minuscule compared to the entire hospital claims in the U.S.

Nickels does have a point, yet the AHA does little to nothing to equip private payers with information needed to determine whether or not the money being paid to hospitals are reasonable and demonstrate high value. But why would they? The AHA represents hospitals, desiring to perpetuate their members’ best interest at the expense of private payers who cover nearly 150 million Americans enrolled in employer plans or through individual market insurance.

Quite frankly, insurers are not immune from this problem either. They can avoid gag clauses that require secret prices and arrangements with hospitals and health systems. Employers, at a bare minimum, expect transparent behavior from their insurers and must insist that insurers eliminate backroom ‘deals’ with health providers.

The opaque pricing methods we have historically allowed must be relegated to the past. It’s time to open the doors and turn on the lights to expose the truth. Past pricing practices, convenient for some but detrimental for most, must be replaced with honorable and sensible pricing practices.

This is my take on the latest RAND report.

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