Health Care Cost Institute

The health care system is hard to understand and navigate, especially when it comes to information about prices.

In an environment where patients are responsible for an increasing share of health care costs, greater price transparency is needed to empower consumers. NYHealth has supported several projects to promote greater price transparency, including an examination of hospital price variation in New York State and various cost calculator tools to help consumers better plan for health care costs. In 2018, NYHealth awarded the Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) a grant to improve price transparency by examining health care spending patterns in New York State.

Under this grant, HCCI allowed access to its health care claims data and collaborated with NYHealth’s policy and research department on analyses related to the Foundation’s Empowering Health Care Consumers core strategy of improving price transparency. Claims data were used to (1) examine health care spending in New York State, (2) analyze the degree to which prices for specific services and drugs account for health care spending, and (3) evaluate the extent to which the trend of more consumers being in high-deductible health plans is having an impact on their price comparison shopping behavior. NYHealth and HCCI worked together to produce reports, journal articles, and data snapshots on these topics and shared them with key stakeholders.

Read the report “Health Care Spending, Prices, and Utilization for Employer-Sponsored Insurance in New York.”

Read the report “Variation in Health Care Prices: The Problem Starts at Birth.”