More Reasons Therapists Should Publish Their Fees for Service

Many therapists know me as a big advocate for therapy practices posting their fees for service publically on their web site and in marketing materials.Still, I know there is general reluctance on the part of many, mostly concerned about “scaring” away patients .

Here is new fuel for the push for transparency in medical fees from a great June 11^th NY Times article written by Claire Cain Miller.

“Americans comparison-shop for items as small as groceries and as big as cars. But they rarely compare prices on their health care. When a doctor recommends a test or a procedure, most patients simply go where the doctor tells them to go. Even if a patient does want to comparison-shop, there is no easy way to obtain complete and useful information. It is a hole in the market that some companies see as an opportunity, especially because many Americans will soon have to pay more attention to what they are paying for, rather than count on insurance to cover everything.

But there has been no easy way for consumers to shop for the best deal on a colonoscopy or blood test. A start-up financed by prominent venture capitalists and the Cleveland Clinic, Castlight Health, aims to change that by building a search engine for health care prices. Patients using Castlight could search for doctors that offer a service nearby and find out how much they will charge, depending on their insurance coverage.

A few others are starting to publish health care prices, including Thomson Reuters, a Tennessee start-up called Change:healthcare, the New Hampshire government, which created a comparison shopping tool for residents, and health insurers. Aetna, for instance, has built tools to help patients estimate prices and may build more advanced tools, said Lonny Reisman, Aetna’s chief medical officer.

Price transparency could significantly change the way health care is bought in the United States. The notion “seems ridiculously simple and obvious, and in any other industry, you would say, ‘Duh, we already have that.’ But in health care, it’s revolutionary,” said Alan M. Garber, a professor of medicine and the director of the center for health policy at Stanford, as well as an investor in Castlight.

The lack of price information in health care has been a big driver of ballooning health care costs, analysts say, because costs are opaque to patients and heavily subsidized by employers. The patient has no incentive or responsibility to keep costs down. But many employers are switching to health plans that require patients to pay more out of their own pockets.

“Since Americans started having employer-sponsored health care, people are paying with someone else’s credit card, so we created a very inefficient market,” said Giovanni Colella, chief executive and a founder of Castlight. “Creating the right incentives changes the way people behave, and that’s where our company comes in.”

Dr. Colella started RelayHealth, which connects patients and doctors over the Web and was bought by McKesson in 2006. He founded Castlight with Todd Park, a founder of Athenahealth and chief technology officer of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

On Thursday, Castlight announced that it raised $60 million from investors, in addition to the $21 million it previously raised. Safeway, the grocery chain, with 200,000 employees, has signed on as its first customer.

Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/technology/11cost.html