ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 6, 1996 TAG: 9602060059
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
THIS IS no time to limit public access to financial information about hospitals and nursing homes.
On the contrary: As managed care takes over as the nation's response to health-care reform, the public has greater need than ever to know about both the cost and quality of care offered by competing medical facilities.
While fee-for-service care has a built-in incentive to overtreat, accounting for some of the rise in medical costs, managed care has an incentive to provide the least amount of treatment necessary. That is more reasonable, but it can carry with it the temptation to provide less care than is sensible.
More to the point, cost control in managed care depends, in part, on consumer judgments made in the medical marketplace. And a majority of hospital care in Virginia still is funded by taxpayers, through Medicare or Medicaid.
So why is Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg, sponsoring a bill in the General Assembly to shut down the Health Service Cost Review Council, a state watchdog agency that tracks such business information as hospital and nursing home charges, differences between their cost and charge per person, and staffing levels? DeBoer says there's little public interest in the data the council collects.
He may be right - if, by public interest, he means the number of people who, while suffering a heart attack, ask how much money a nonprofit, tax-exempt hospital is making from its for-profit affiliates, or even the number who ask nowadays to see financial specifics from nursing homes they are considering for infirm parents.
Yet such information is, in fact, of great value. For now, it helps groups watching out for the public's interest in a field where few individuals can be expected to have the knowledge to be savvy consumers. For the longer term, it should improve the quality of decisions made by consumers - not just individuals, but alliances of insured people and businesses seeking quality care at reasonable cost.
The data certainly are invaluable to the state's regional health systems agencies, when they evaluate hospital and nursing home applications for certificates of need for more beds, services or equipment. Numbers tell interesting stories - to those who can read them.
One person who can, Pat Palmer of Salem, has grown a business from incorrect hospital charges. She uses public information collected by the council to spot overcharges and double charges on hospital bills and get reimbursement for clients. It's a neat idea.
There's no good time to limit public information. But now, in the health-care field, is a particularly bad time.
LENGTH: Medium: 52 linesby CNB