It can be daunting to think about the big-picture challenges we face in transforming our health care system. But there are clear signs that positive change is underway. Most of us just haven’t noticed yet.
This massive and massively welcome sea change in health care has started unfolding, and health providers, insurers and employers are scrambling to keep up. Why? Because on Jan. 1 of this year, a $100 fine per health plan member per day went into effect for employers that fail to arm their employees with comprehensive, transparent, easily accessible competitive pricing options for their health care.
Obviously, businesses need to avoid this potentially catastrophic outcome. That means owners and executives must insist that their health care brokers provide software tools that they can pass along to their employees to comply with the Transparency in Coverage Rule. But that’s over. Lots of consumers have high-deductible health plans. They aren’t going to pay $5,000 for something that they can get for $400 — especially when they can now be provided access to technology such as that developed by my company to enter virtually any test or procedure into their smartphones and see the price of essentially every test and procedure from every provider for miles around.