Grantees in the News

As Laura Newman discusses in a piece for Patient POV, price transparency is one strategy many view as a way to reduce health care spending and offer consumers choice.

In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Samantha Liss describes the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to challenge the proposed merger between Anthem and Cigna, which the DOJ argues will reduce competition among insurance carriers in dozens of markets and increase costs for consumers.

In a recent piece for Kaiser Health News, Michelle Andrews discusses findings from a recent study from RAND Corporation that found that even when there is a retail clinic nearby, consumers are just as likely to go to the emergency department for low-level problems.

In a piece for Dark Daily, Donna Marie Pocius discusses a HCFO-funded study from James Robinson, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, which documented changes in laboratory pricing and the

A recent Physician’s Briefing article discusses findings from a HCFO-funded study from Anna Sinaiko, Harvard University, that found that patients searching for prices on imaging services and sleep studies choose health care facilities with lower prices.

For nearly thirty years, staff at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization (HCFO) initiative worked to provide public and private decision makers with usable and timely information on health care policy, financing, and market developments.

As health care spending continues to grow, leaders in the field are looking for ways to reduce spending without sacrificing high-quality care. Price transparency is often viewed as one way to do this. As a recent Medical Xpress article discusses, price information in combination with insurance benefits designed to share cost savings when patients choose low-cost health care facilities has been associated with lower spending.

In a piece for HIT Leaders & News, Bruce Haupt of ClearBalance discusses the consumerism movement and the shift towards health care cost transparency.

In a piece for STAT, Shayla Love discusses a new digital medicine startup that aims to fill the coverage gaps that many cheaper insurance plans leave by replacing doctor visits with text messages and emails. She describes the model as a hybrid between companies that provide one-off video or phone chats and traditional doctors’ offices that offer virtual visits. Love notes that telemedicine is still new, referencing findings from a HCFO-funded study from R.

In a piece for the Association of Health Care Journalists blog, Joanne Kenen of Politico discusses the landscape of health care price transparency.