Could healthcare price transparency lower costs? Mike Rogers thinks so

GOP US Senate candidate Mike Rogers outlined his healthcare policy agenda in Taylor over the weekend
His priorities include making healthcare costs more transparent and lowering prescription drug prices to make healthcare more affordable
Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a proponent of ‘Medicare for All,’ has said Rogers’ approach wouldn’t solve the issue

TAYLOR — As healthcare costs grow ever higher, Michigan GOP US Senate candidate Mike Rogers argues that better consumer awareness of how much the services they need cost will help bring prices down.

“People need to understand what the cost is when they walk in” to a hospital or clinic, Rogers said during a Saturday press conference outlining his healthcare policy agenda in Taylor. “I think you get rid of the $8 aspirins when you do that, and people start to realize that they can make better choices.”

Where Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants to see a full overhaul of the country’s healthcare system — he’s a longtime supporter of “Medicare for All” — Rogers on Saturday said he’d rather “fix the system that we have” with an emphasis on lowering prescription drug costs and arming consumers with more information.

El-Sayed, a former public health official, criticized his opponent’s past opposition to allowing Medicare to negotiate lower costs for prescription drugs. As a federal lawmaker, Rogers supported Medicare Part D, the law allowing prescription drug coverage in Medicare, though he subsequently voted against efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

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“The choice in this race could not be clearer when it comes to who Michiganders can trust to bring down healthcare costs,” El-Sayed spokesperson Cole Wozniak said, citing El-Sayed’s commitment to guaranteeing affordable healthcare for all Americans and his work as health director to reduce medical debt and provide free glasses for kids.

Price transparency

Rogers’ plan includes support of fines being imposed on hospitals and insurance companies that don’t publicly post real prices for patients. His calls for greater price transparency and additional regulations do not extend to pharmaceutical companies under the plan.

Rogers’ positions on notifying consumers about the price of care and about insurers’ denials of coverage echo policy positions outlined by groups like PhRMA that represent the pharmaceutical industry.

Some measures aimed at increasing transparency for consumers already exist at the federal level — the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has a rule for healthcare plans and hospitals to make price comparison information available to patients before they receive care, and a separate CMS rule requires insurance plans to publicly post approval and denial rates.

There are limits to that transparency, notably that “the average patient has no chance, just absolutely none” of getting a clear answer on the true costs of services because of the complexity of how the information is shared, said Bret Jackson of the Economic Alliance for Michigan.

“Even if you could find the price, it has no bearing on what you, as an individual person, is going to pay,” Jackson said. “You have to apply your healthcare benefit to this information… it’s so many steps, and it’s complicated, and it’s just not going to work for the average person.”

In Congress, the bipartisan Patients Deserve Price Tags Act legislation pending in both the US House and Senate, would, if passed, codify transparency requirements around health prices and enforce them. US Rep. John James, a Michigan Republican currently running as the GOP candidate for governor, is a lead sponsor on the House version of the bills.

But “transparency is just a tool” that alone likely won’t be enough to bring costs down, Jackson added.

“Even if you have information, you’re choosing between expensive and really expensive, right?” he said. “But if we can at least have transparency, we can find out where the money is going…and try to negotiate for a better offering.”

Asked by Bridge Michigan what specifically his plan would do to improve upon the current system, Rogers said he believes that knowing how much the services they need cost at different providers would give patients greater leverage to comparison shop, thereby driving costs down.

“It has to be across the board,” he said. “Everybody has to participate in this.”

Prescription drug costs

In one recent campaign ad, he compared high costs in the US to those of Canada — a nation that operates a universal, government-run healthcare system.

“The pharmaceutical companies are ripping American families off,” Rogers says in the clip. “I’ll take on Big Pharma, I’ll take on insurers, I’ll take on hospital monopolies.”

In his agenda, he calls for an expansion of the TrumpRx program for lowering prescription drug costs, advocating for taking better advantage of the government’s ability to “buy in bulk, force prices down, and pass those savings onto the consumer” and speeding up approval of lower cost generic drug options.

“I think there’s even more that we can do” to bring drug costs down, he told reporters Saturday.

Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a longtime proponent of ‘Medicare for All,’ has argued Rogers’ plans would do little to bring down costs of healthcare and prescription drugs (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)

El-Sayed and other Democrats have criticized Rogers’ connections to the pharmaceutical industry, including hundreds of thousands in past campaign contributions and sponsorship of legislation to expand access to prescription pain medication.

Over the summer, El-Sayed called Rogers a lobbyist for the drug industry and falsely claimed he’d taken “a $14 million payout” for that work, which prompted the Rogers campaign to send a June 22 cease and desist letter demanding that El-Sayed stop and threatening legal action.

A Bridge Michigan fact check of the claims found that while Rogers was never a registered lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, he has accepted contributions from groups and individuals tied to the industry in past campaigns and previously advocated for access to opioids for pain management.

El-Sayed’s approach

Among Democrats, the healthcare conversation has largely centered around how to expand coverage, whether that’s building off of the Affordable Care Act, overhauling the system entirely or something in between.

El-Sayed has made support for Medicare for All a key tenet of his campaign and has said he is frustrated health care costs have continued to climb, but “grateful that we are in a position to be able to speak to the pain that Michiganders are facing with the real solutions.”

While the Medicare for All legislation championed by progressives like US Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont would eliminate private insurance options, El-Sayed said earlier this year he supports allowing an option for workers to keep supplemental private insurance provided by unions or employers.

Advocates for Medicare for All contend that US residents already pay far more for healthcare than other nations without the same level of benefits.

And they argue Medicare for All could ultimately lower total costs by cutting private insurer profits, streamlining health care administration and empowering the government to negotiate lower drug prices and provider payments.

Single-payer health care proposals have been a perennial priority for progressives, but they’ve never garnered majority support among congressional lawmakers or voters, many of whom value the choices private insurance offers or fear the high price tag of shifting to a government-run system.

Rogers has slammed El-Sayed’s proposal, on Saturday arguing that if El-Sayed wants a system that looks like Canada’s, “he should move to Canada. I mean, he might have better health care there.”