Tag:
Healthcare Costs
Latest Headlines
Latest Headlines
Future of ACA will focus on lowering healthcare costs
Assuming that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, Democrats now turn their attention to lowering costs.
Prices not to blame for health spending growth
Health spending growth may not be a result of the rising cost of health services, but it's still worth keeping an eye on, according to Kaiser Family Foundation CEO Drew Altman.
Insurers can help slow healthcare spending
Governent data indicates that healthcare spending growth in 2013 slowed to just 3.6 percent, the lowest level in more than 50 years. Sustaining this slowdown won't be easy, but insurers can play a key role in making it happen.
We could save $184B if consumers pay more attention to costs
Consumers don't know what health services or procedures cost, so they can't make informed decisions about where and whether they receive care. As it turns out, there are many ways for consumers to get pricing information. So if these tools exist, why don't consumers use them?
UnitedHealth's Lee Newcomer: Effective bundled payments require physician leaders, collaboration
UnitedHealthcare has created and implemented effective bundled payments, including a program that lowered medical costs for breast, colon and lung cancer treatment by 34 percent. In partnership with those providers, UnitedHealth established more than 60 quality and cost measures to determine whether the bundled payment program was achieving its goals. Lee Newcomer, UnitedHealth's senior vice president of oncology, tells FierceHealthPayer how it worked.
Aetna CEO: Mixed feelings leading into open enrollment
It's going to be a long time before insurers start seeing healthy consumers enroll in the health insurance exchanges, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said in an interview with CNBC.
Payers, providers disagree over how to lower healthcare costs
The largest insurer and hospital system in Maine each have their own opinions about how to best lower healthcare costs in the state. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine thinks there should be more community-based primary care options, while MaineHealth wants to focus on economic development and growth, reported Government Health IT.
Price transparency leads to lower claims costs, research finds
When consumers have access to pricing information before they obtain medical services, insurers' claims payments are lower, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Stanford professor predicts doom for health insurers
Competition among health systems and pressure to cut costs will transform--if not doom--health insurance companies in their current form, Stanford University Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer argues in a Fortune article.
Massachusetts is driving consumer-oriented focus in industry
As Massachusetts became the first state earlier this month to require insurers provide real-time prices for all covered medical services, it's leading the trend toward a more consumer-oriented healthcare insurance industry.