On February 10, 2022 price inflation jumped by 7.5% over the past 12 months, its highest annual increase in 40 years. For employers and other health care purchasers that monitor their claims cost and utilization data religiously (who doesn’t?), this news prompts questions from purchasers about how inflation will impact their future health care spend.
Suzanne Delbanco catches up with Niall Brennan, President and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI), to ask the tough questions on price and utilization data for employer-sponsored health care.
Should employers impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates? The keyword here is “should” (“can” is a legal question that has already been largely answered and is not the subject of this blog). But “should vaccination be required” leaves room for debate. While bioethical analyses typically rely on multiple frameworks, this blog should be considered a primer on two of the ‘hallmark’ bioethical principles: autonomy and justice.
In this blog post, we offer best practices for vendors preparing for “case study” presentations in the direct-to-employer context.
First of all, why case studies? Case studies are empirical inquiries that investigate a phenomenon in a real-world context.
When the RBP vendor and provider “agree” on a rate, who pays the difference? The RBP vendor or the employer? It depends – and the outcome will likely be reflected in the vendor’s administrative fee.
Employers and consumers are eager for solutions that attack health care cost inflation at its root cause. One prominent strategy is using reference-based pricing (RBP) models that anchor commercial rates to Medicare, or some other rationalized external benchmark. Like so many health care innovations, reference-based frameworks encompass multiple branching models, and as such the term “RBP” has come to mean different things to different stakeholders.
Would 2020 be the year that health care purchasers finally abandon broad PPO networks in favor of curated solutions like narrow, tiered or high-performance networks? Julianne McGarry review’s KFF’s 2020 Employer Health Benefits Survey to find out.
What we’ve learned from health care economists, policy experts, and business leaders has begun to illuminate the contours of a new health care economy, re-shaped in the wake of the global pandemic.
