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What are preventive health services? Preventive health services help people stay healthy and detect health problems early. Preventive care includes services like wellness visits, immunizations, contraceptive services, and cancer screenings. Specific services recommended by expert committees must be provided at no cost to the patient. This means that even if a patient has not met their plan deducti...

The Lower Costs, More Transparency Act (H.R. 5378) currently before Congress aims to increase price transparency in health care and address the high cost of prescription drugs. One of the provisions of the bill would change the way Medicare pays for physician administered drugs. Currently, Medicare pays a higher price for drugs that are administered in a hospital outpatient setting than drugs that...

HCCI's research on hospital price transparency was cited in a Modern Healthcare article on cash prices for hospital procedures.  From the article: "C-section prices across one large California health system's hospital network ranged from $7,634 to $70,553, data from the Health Care Cost Institute shows." Commercial prices for common hospital procedures often exceed cash prices | Modern Health...

HCCI research Kevin Kennedy was quoted in a Crain's New York Business story on hospital price transparency rules.   From the article: "It was pretty clear that the $300 a day wasn't going to be that much of an incentive for hospitals to comply when you're talking about multi-million- or -billion-dollar businesses," said Kevin Kennedy, a researcher at the Health Care Cost Institute, ...

HCCI's created a list of most common outpatient procedures used in an article on the difficulty of using hospital price transparency data.  Effort to Decipher Hospital Prices Yields Key Finding: Don’t Try It at Home - News Nation USA A federal price transparency rule that took effect this year was supposed to give patients, employers and insurers a clearer picture of the true cost of https://...

HCCI's President and CEO Niall Brennan was featured in an episode of a podcast produced by the National Conference of State Legislatures. From the podcast description: "The guest on the podcast is an expert in the area of health data and analytics. Niall Brennan is the president and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on data to analyze key issues affecting th...

HCCI's research into recent HHS hospital price transparency regulations was featured in Real Clear Health.  From the article: "Our findings demonstrating widespread noncompliance align with those in recent studies published by Health Affairs, The Health Care Cost Institute, and the Kaiser Family Foundation." Real Healthcare Prices Remain Elusive | RealClearHealth A slew of recent healthc...

The staggering death toll of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States has been widely reported, surpassing 523,000 as of March 8, 2021. Over the course of the current pandemic a common method for measuring the probable number of deaths caused by COVID-19 has been comparing actual deaths in 2020 to the expected number of deaths in 2020 based on deaths in previous years. To add to the gro...

HCCI's President and CEO Niall Brennan was featured in a Wall Street Journal Article on hospital price transparency disclosures at Sutter Health.  From the article: "'It is shining a light on the insanity of U.S. healthcare pricing,' said Niall Brennan, chief executive of the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that analyzes medical costs. 'It's at the center of the affordability cri...

HCCI's research on the prices private insurers pay versus Medicare was featured in Modern Healthcare on the recent CMS price transparency rule.  From the article: "That bright light illuminates hospitals' most lucrative revenue streams. Private insurers pay an estimated 51 percent to 200 percent more than the federal Medicare program, according to a recent Health Care Cost Institute...

HCCI's President and CEO Niall Brennan was featured in a Modern Healthcare article on hospital compliance with CMS's price transparency rule.  From the article: " 'Hospitals have opposed this from the get-go. I don't think they should be facing implementation challenges,' Health Care Cost Institute CEO Niall Brennan said. 'These are large, multimillion, and, in many cases, multibillion-dollar...

HCCI's President and CEO Niall Brennan was featured in a an article on CMS's price transparency rule. From the article:  "It's 'frustratingly incomplete,' said Niall Brennan, president and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute, which compiles claims data from big payers including Aetna and Kaiser Permanente. 'There is no real mechanism to figure out how many hospitals complied with the r...

HCCI's research on shoppable services and the prices of vaginal and Cesarean births were featured in a Forbes article on a new CMS price transparency rule. From the article: "New parents in the San Francisco area can expect to pay anywhere from around $11,000 to over $23,000 for a vaginal birth and between roughly $15,000 and $40,000 for a Cesarean section, according to research from the Health Ca...

Summary: Since April, 1.9 million excess years of life have been lost, 13% above historical average. Over the course of the pandemic, we found age and sex contributions to excess YLL have shifted. Deaths among adults 65 and older accounted for 80% of excess YLL in April but only 36% of excess YLL in June. Since April, working age adults 20-64 have accounted for 47% of excess YLL, and males 20...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a previously unimaginable impact both in the United States and globally. It is increasingly clear as we enter the fifth month of the pandemic, with rising caseloads and deaths, that the United States will need to continue to address the COVID-19 pandemic for the foreseeable future. Each day, we learn more – about the virus clinically, about the people and...

HCCI, Duke, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina release interactive data on state health care spending to inform the public and policymakers. DURHAM, NC – Researchers at The Health Care Cost Institute, Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, Duke University School of Medicine Department of Population Health Sciences, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nort...

It's been a while since my last broad-based update on HCCI's work. With so much going on in the world, I want to bring you up to speed on the many activities underway at HCCI, including our response to the COVID-19 pandemic and our transition to a new dataset that will incorporate claims from Aetna, Humana and Blue Health Intelligence. Everyone's attention is rightfully focused on COVID-19 right n...

HCCI research on the potential effects of price transparency on price variation was cited in a recent Washington Post article. "There is more wiggle room on the high side — it could make up for price increases on the lower side," said Kevin Kennedy, one of the study researchers. The Health 202: Health-care costs might decline if hospitals are forced by the Trump administration to disclose the...

On November 27, 2019 CMS proposed a rule (CMS-9915-P) requiring group health plans and health insurance issuers in the individual and group markets to disclose cost-sharing information to enrollees, including an estimates of an enrollee's cost-sharing liability for covered items or services furnished by a particular provider. As also noted in our comments on rule CMS-1717-P, HC...

As previous reports have indicated, there is widespread price variation in the U.S. commercial health care system. Many studies have shown that prices are dramatically different not only across geographies, but they vary substantially even within the same market for the same service. For example, we found that prices for the same blood tests could vary 39-fold within Tampa, Florida and the cost of...

In HCCI's publication in Health Affairs Blog, we examine the case for systemic health system transparency and directing changes towards key stakeholders.  From the article: "Health care costs strain the budgets of families, businesses, and governments, leaving less room for other spending and forcing painful tradeoffs. In 2017, the United States spent $3.5 trillion on health care - ...

Addition of Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies' data will expand nation's leading resource for understanding health care cost trends.  CHICAGO (November 12, 2019) – The Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) and Blue Health Intelligence® (BHI®) announced today a multi-year data partnership, significantly expanding HCCI's data resources and bolstering its ability to provide research insights to a...

On August 9, 2019, CMS released a rule for calendar year 2020 revisions to the Medicare hospital outpatient prospective payment system (CMS-1717-P).Our comments specifically refer to Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 180 on Price Transparency of Hospital Standard Charges. Feedback will be used to guide discussions on improving price transparency in health care. We are con...

HCCI was recently requested to respond to a request from Senate HELP Committee Chairman, Senator Lamar Alexander, for recommendations to address America's rising health care costs. HCCI recommends establishing a comprehensive multi-payer source of health claims data which could then be used to evaluate the performance of the health care system and future policy proposals.   Download PDF File ...

HCCI will continue to analyze spending trends; Researchers will have HCCI data access until the end of 2022 The Health Care Cost Institute and United Healthcare are sunsetting their data collaboration relationship agreement, that has provided United's deidentified insurance claims data for analyses of U.S. healthcare spending, utilization, and market performance. HCCI continues to receive data fro...