Press Releases: Healthcare Transparency

At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has caused massive shifts in state policies on telehealth and scope of practice in healthcare, a new Pioneer Institute study underscores that most of the 50 states continue to suffer from weak laws regarding price transparency.  The study identified states that have laws that require carriers, providers or both to provide personalized cost information to consumers before obtaining healthcare services.  Fully 33 states placed in the lowest of the three broad analytic tiers on the strength of their state healthcare transparency laws. 

Pioneer's new study raises concerns about the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s (DPH’s) Crises Standards of Care (CSC) issued earlier this month, which bear the earmarks of a state bureaucratic effort and should be rethought under a process that includes a thorough vetting by Massachusetts citizens.

A new Pioneer poll shows seven out of ten Massachusetts workers who get their health insurance through their employers want to know the price of a healthcare procedure before they obtain it, but most of them do not how to obtain such information, even though information is already available through their insurers’ cost estimator tools.

BOSTON – Pioneer Institute will present the results of a new consumer poll at “A Roadmap to Healthcare Price Transparency,” a forum by Pioneer and several partners, to be held Monday, November 4th from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Great Hall...

Today, Pioneer Institute filed a Public Comment with the federal government urging the U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to launch a much-needed national effort to make healthcare price transparency consumer friendly and easily accessible to both insured and uninsured consumers...

Read coverage of this report in WCVB-TV, Boston Herald, the Boston Business Journal, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, and FierceHealthcare. Authors recommend greater transparency and financial incentives for patients to choose lower-cost, high-value providers BOSTON – There is little correlation between a patient’s...

Pioneer applauds the Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) on its recent release of all data behind its consumer facing CompareCare pricing tool for Massachusetts consumers. The CHIA CompareCare tool contains payer- provider specific data for 295 common procedures. To access each payer-provider-procedure,...

Value-based reimbursement, focus on middlemen in drug distribution system more likely to reduce prices, provide consumers with valuable information BOSTON – As Massachusetts lawmakers consider healthcare price transparency legislation, a new Pioneer Institute study finds that most new drug pricing transparency laws...

Making all-payer claims data public could put downward pressure on high-cost providers, reduce overall healthcare costs   BOSTON – Data from the Massachusetts Center for Health Information and Analysis (CHIA) show wide variations in the prices agreed to between individual insurers and providers,...

Read press coverage of this report in the Boston Business Journal and State House News Service. Tools are more user friendly and cover growing number of procedures, but still used by just a small fraction of potential market BOSTON – A Pioneer Institute...