The Need for Transparency in Healthcare Reform
By Betsy Imholz
Special Projects Director
Consumers Union
The era for public reporting of medical safety and cost data is now! That’s why transparency is a key piece of healthcare reform.
In a new survey from the esteemed Commonwealth Fund, three-fourths of health opinion leaders said that increased transparency about quality and price is important to improving the U.S. health system performance. More than 4 in 5 opinion leaders think that stimulating provider performance improvement activities is the key benefit of quality and price transparency.
Another national survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 95% of Americans think having information about the quality of care provided by hospitals and doctors is important, and 91% feel that having information about the cost of care before they receive it is important.
This confirms the importance of the consumer group-supported "transparency provisions" in the reform bill ABx1 1 – provisions that would require a comprehensive plan for collecting and publicly reporting safety, quality and cost data across the full range of providers in California.
November 20, 2007 at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Blog Reactions
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