UnitedHealth Group to lead health care costs disclosure effort

UnitedHealth Group will lead an effort organized by the Health Care Cost Institute to track and disclose the amounts paid for health care services across the nation.

by John Tyburski

Copyright © Daily Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

First published at DailyDigest News on May 14, 2014

The nonprofit organization Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) based in Washington, DC, announced Wednesday that UnitedHealth Group, an organization based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, that provides its customers health care coverage, benefits, and services, will lead its effort to record and make public the costs of health care services across the U.S. The effort is based on cost information released by Medicare in the past two years under plans developed by the Obama administration. These published costs related to services rendered by both hospitals and physicians.

The initiative promises to provide “reference pricing” for health care services that are relevant to the individual customer’s community. The reference prices are to be derived from aggregate insurer data and will help customers predict their out-of-pocket expenses for the services they need or desire.

“The public has been clamoring for this,” said David Newman, executive director of HCCI. “This was the next natural step for us as an institute to evolve to.” Newman anticipates that the pricing service will become available in early 2015.

This new effort expands on the original mission of HCCI when it was established in 2011. Before then, most health care pricing data comes only from Medicare and other government programs. They key feature of the HCCI project is that it will reveal what insurers are paying for specific health care services. These amounts are typically much lower than the amounts the providers initially attempt to recover through billing. Both physician and hospital industries have objected to the program.

Three health care benefits organizations will participate. In combination with UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana will potentially share information on billions of individual medical claims and more than $1 trillion in spending.

“We’re looking to reorient the health care system around the consumer, and we see this as another step in that process,” said Ethan Slavin, a spokesman for Aetna.

Kaiser Permanente was originally involved in 2011 but has since discontinued participation. Cigna and WellPoint declined invitations to participate, according to company sources.