The Oct. 27 editorial on pricing transparency seems to extol price transparency and/or reference pricing as a panacea. However, nothing could be farther from reality.
The editorial seems to focus mainly on the price portion of Professor Uwe Reinhardt's point and not the equally important second point, which was “will pay less when they are assured that quality … is equal.” Therefore, in the current price/transparency discussion, what's not being considered is that there is a lack of provider/plan quality information that is available and meaningful to consumers.
The area of quality measurement is in its infancy. Current quality measures are inadequate, need refinement and are not yet meaningfully explainable to consumers. Having price information without meaningful quality indicators tells the consumer nothing.
In addition, assuming one could identify appropriate quality measures, there are subsidiary issues of how the various quality measures should be weighted to provide a meaningful aggregate quality indicator or score to consumers relative to price and how such scores/measures are explained/conveyed to consumers. As an example of weighting, the current Medicare quality-measurement system for defining a provider's quality score weights a hospital's mortality rate equal to the hospital's readmission rate. We would suggest that most consumers would not weight them the same. By definition, these are Medicare's weights, not what a consumer/beneficiary would deem important.
We might be moving in the right direction with regard to price transparency and comparisons, but we are nowhere near the end game of placing price and quality on the same plane to allow meaningful consumer choice.
