Price transparency. A guiding voice on many topics in healthcare economics, from the future of Medicare to the obstacles facing consumer-driven healthcare. Current complaint: the hospital pricing "monstrosity" -- because patients can't be enlightened consumers without a clear understanding of the price of goods they are buying. His proposal for achieving transparency concerns mimicking the "diagnosis-related groups" used in Medicare. Prices for DRGs could be used as benchmarks, to which hospitals could then apply regionally specific conversion factors to account for economic variations. (A hospital in New York City will not be restricted to the prices of a hospital in Topeka.) The catch is in the conversion factors: who will determine them? He has ideas about that, too. We don't know if his idea will fly, but transparency is pet topic here, so we're rooting for it. Dr. Reinhardt has experience with pricing in healthcare: From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by the U.S. Congress. He has also been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978.

Blogging in the NYT in January:

"In a nutshell, my proposal calls for applying to all patients the payment method developed by Medicare during the 1960s and 1970s and mandated upon all American hospitals by the Reagan administration in 1983. This approach has been so successful that in the meantime it has been adopted by other industrial countries as well — notably by Australia, France and Germany."