The state of Oregon has made available to the public a comparison of the costs of some common health care procedures. Here's the introductory blurb from the Oregon Health Policy and Research web site:
Governor Kulongoski has made health care accessibility and affordability one of his top priorities, including increased transparency about health care costs and quality. As one of these priorities, the Governor has emphasized that health care costs should be transparent, easily accessible and understandable to consumers. When consumers of health care services have clear information about the costs, risk and benefits of care, they can make more informed decisions for themselves and their families. Oregonians have a right to know what they're paying for before - not after - they receive the bill.
While these goals are laudable, I can't imagine the average health care consumer drilling down into the state's somewhat-geeky web site to compare costs. (For example, a cororary bypass can cost from $16,000 to $57,000.) Try it yourself by visiting the cost search start page.
I wonder how this program can be effective without health care providers actively supplying the consumer with cost comparison information at the time when the consumer is making a purchase decision.
I spent an hour or so trying to discover some simple cost comparisons. My first discovery was that for the hospital of primary interest for me (the only hospital in Benton County) there was almost no data available. Knowing what the costs were in Portland might be of interest to some folks, but that didn't help me much.
The data set used to compile this report is clearly insufficient to accomplish the job. With so much missing data and with the most recent data being from 2006, it is impossible to come up with meaningful comparisons between hospitals. The major conclusion seems to be that costs at all hospitals in Oregon are average for Oregon. Now just how does that help me?
One of the problems may be that the statistical method used in the analysis assumed a confidence level of 0.05% (I couldn't find the level actually used). That level is the default value for many purposes, but when we are talking about the probability of my dying if I have a hip replacement at hospital X, I would prefer that we use a confidence level of 0.01% in the analysis.
The Governor no doubt means well and this report is a step in the right direction, but from my viewpoint it is for all practical purposes useless. If a satisfactory data set were available perhaps something useful could emerge from a report like this.