Health Care Cost Institute

See the following -

Kangaroos, Insurance Companies, and the Rising Cost of Healthcare

Complaining about health care prices is nothing new. The medical component of CPI has been higher than the overall CPI for decades. As far back as 1989 Gerry Anderson and colleagues showed "It's the Prices, Stupid" that explained why our national spending was so high compared to other countries. More recently, Elizabeth Rosenthal detailed those prices in an series of reports in The New York Times. She recently followed those up with her incisive book An American Sickness. Dr. Rosenthal also illustrated some of the clever techniques used to wring the most money out of our pockets, such as the upcoding industry and tacking facility fees onto visits. As the saying goes, if you're sitting at a poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you.

Strengthening Protection of Patient Medical Data

Adam Tanner | The Century Foundation | January 10, 2017

Americans seeking medical care expect a certain level of privacy. Indeed, the need for patient privacy is a principle dating back to antiquity, and is codified in U.S. law, most notably the Privacy Rule of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes standards that work toward protecting patient health information. But the world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data...

Read More »

What Feds' Push To Share Health Data Means For Patients

Charles Ornstein | NPR | May 9, 2016

Two years ago, when the federal government first released data on how much Medicare paid physicians, the media coverage was widespread. Doctors who earned significant sums were dubbed "Medicare millionaires" and journalists highlighted unusual patterns in how some doctors bill for services. When Medicare released its third round of data last Thursday, the coverage was practically nonexistent. In some ways, that's because data releases from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have become almost routine...

Read More »