Health Care Price Transparency Heroes: Leaders We Love Leading the Way for Price Transparency in Healthcare
In honor of Valentine’s Day, we will be highlighting some of the healthcare price transparency heroes that we adore. There are a lot of influential players in the world of health care price transparency who are taking brave steps to improve patient access to health costs and quality information, but these are a few of our favorites…
- Steven Brill – A lawyer, journalist and celebrated author; Steven Brill is most commonly known for his expose on the shocking billing practices of hospitals. Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us was a Time Magazine cover story in 2013 which sparked a national conversation about how hospital executives game the system to make a profit, making patients’ medical bills insanely inflated regardless of insurance. Brill brought the topic of price transparency to the forefront and got people talking about the issue.
- Rick Scott – The Florida Governor has been making headlines recently due to his price transparency push in Florida. He recently released a commercial in which he urges area hospitals to provide better upfront pricing to patients to improve transparency. Scott has also been pushing hospitals to disclose price information from health insurance groups regarding how much they pay them so patients can tell if what they are paying is fair.
- Herb B. Kuhn – CEO of the Missouri Hospital Association, Herb B. Kuhn, has lead the launch of a pricing website entitled Focus on Hospitals which aims to provide healthcare consumers with better quality data. The prices shared do not reflect negotiated insurance rates, but it gives Missouri patients a better idea of how much they should be paying for the most common medical procedures.
- Philip Betbeze – We’ve been following Betbeze’s articles on HealthLeaders Media for a while now and he never shies away from writing about hot button issues related to consumerism in healthcare and price transparency. With his main audience being made up of healthcare industry decision-makers and physicians; he wields the opportunity to get in front of the industry leaders who can exact change. Talk about the pen being mightier than the sword, using price transparency to lower health costs for patients.
- Sarah Kliff – Another one of our favorite healthcare writers, Kliff is a senior editor at Vox.com where she overs health, medicine and education. She has lead discussions on pricing in pharmaceuticals, the Affordable Care Act’s future and the impact on the single-payer health care system. Her articles are always thought-provoking and eye-opening, but she’s also one of our favorites on Twitter. She provides great stats and articles and she’s pretty funny, too.
- Suzanne Delbanco, PhD – Delbanco is the Executive Director of the Catalyst for Payment Reform which is a National Non-Profit Organization dedicated to improving the way Americans pay for their health care. Their goal is to improve quality and price transparency, which they gained national recognition for when they released a scathing report card calling out most states on their lack of transparency. Spearhead by Delbanco, CPR has impacted many to inquire about the lack of transparency at their state level.
Shout out to all those out there working to improve price and quality transparency in the U.S. If you know of any others who are making an impact in the world of health care consumerism, we want to know about them! Feel free to tweet to us @saveonmedical with #HealthHeroes to tell us about other influencers.
