Dive Brief:
- Washington state lawmakers have passed two bills that will make more information about healthcare prices and quality available to the state's consumers.
- One of the bills will create a database providing cost and quality information about physicians, clinics and hospitals across the state. The other bill awaiting the governor's signature would require insurance companies to give consumers a cost and quality comparison tool for healthcare procedures.
- The bill creating a database is limited to healthcare prices paid by plans covering state employees and Medicaid, though large companies like Boeing and Microsoft, which self-insure, could choose to share their cost data.
Dive Insight:
In theory, databases offering comparative cost and quality information about providers should give consumers valuable guidance as to where to spend their healthcare dollars. And the tool offering cost and quality comparison tools for consumers should guide them to the highest value provider for the procedure. In practice, however, I'd argue that consumers are far more likely to go to consumer rating services like Yelp and see how many stars a provider has gotten when making their healthcare decisions. Yes, Yelp and its peers are far cruder than state run databases, but they're extremely easy to understand.