Solidarity HealthShare President and Co-Founder Chris Faddis joined The SonRise Morning Show to talk about the importance of price transparency in American healthcare. Read the transcript below.
Matt Swain (00:07):
The Sonrise Morning show continues. I’m Matt Swain, joined now by Chris and president of Solidarity HealthShare. Good morning, Chris.
Chris Faddis (00:15):
Good morning, Matt. Good to talk to you.
Matt Swain (00:17):
Yeah, good to talk to you as well. And healthcare price transparency is something that comes up over and over again with every new year. There’s all kinds of new laws that you would have to have an advanced degree and unlimited hours to figure out when it comes to healthcare. This is something that I think most consumers really want though, isn’t it? Transparency,
Chris Faddis (00:37):
Yeah especially when it comes to healthcare. I mean, you and I, we have transparency. When we go to a restaurant and order a meal, we have transparency. Even when we go to a mechanic, we know what we’re going to be paying for. I mean, these days, have you ever had a mechanic not tell you what it costs before they do the procedure on your car? And unfortunately, we still have to fight for that in healthcare and do a lot of work to get the fair and reasonable price or as we like to say, the fair and just price for a medical need. And it doesn’t make sense. But you’re right. I mean, most Americans want to see it. 90% of Americans, in fact, support reform in healthcare for price transparency. And it’s a definite need. We’re seeing healthcare costs rising and we’ve got to fix this problem.
Matt Swain (01:23):
Why is it that we have not seen transparency really be pushed forward the way that it would be? Like you say, perfect example, if I go to my mechanic, they’re going to tell me exactly how much it costs. They want me to pay for it. Why would they lie to me?
Chris Faddis (01:37):
Right. Right. Yeah. And I think that’s the thing is I think most of us generally get shopping around. So what we’ve seen is we’ve seen individual companies and groups decide they’re going to be the transparent. In Oklahoma City, there’s a great surgical center there that many years ago, I would say 20, 25 years ago now, they decided they were going to be the price transparent surgical center. And the great thing that happened was many hospitals in Oklahoma started having to post their own prices and became more competitive because they had competition now, and they had somebody who was willing to tell the whole story so consumers can make good decisions. I don’t know why we’ve had little effect a few years ago, 2020, the very end of the first Trump term, they passed a law called the No Surprises Act that did force hospitals and providers to give some pricing data.
(02:28):
Not all, but a big part of it was it was all machine readable. So you and I can’t just log in and look at it. You’ve got to pay for a service that can interpret the data. And that’s difficult. And a lot of them have not complied. And unfortunately, the government hasn’t fully enforced those provisions of the law. So what needs to happen is a wholesale look at pricing. There’s also price disparity. We have independent physicians get paid a lesser dollar amount for providing the same service that a hospital system pays, provides. And so hospitals have bought up all of the independent physicians so that they could make that profit. And that’s why over 80% of physicians are no longer independent. And so it’s almost like a monopoly now. You don’t have as much competition even in a given city in order to get pricing down. So these are all things we’ve got to work on. And there’s definitely fixes out there. I mean, for one, just require that pricing is disclosed upfront. I mean, it’s not that hard. It’s being done in certain places. We certainly know how to figure it out as Solidarity. We do it for our members. We have to do it on the backend in order to make sure we get the prices down for our members, and we’re happy to do that, but it should be something every consumer has access to.
Matt Swain (03:43):
Well, and you use the key word that applies this to Catholic social teaching, which is the word justice, right? Justice. It’s the virtue of giving someone what is due to them. And that means that if we want to pay for a service, we should give someone what is due to them fairly for that service. And so it is incumbent both upon the consumer to pay the fair price and for the person providing the service to provide it at a fair cost. This is not crazy, right?
Chris Faddis (04:15):
Absolutely. Yeah. And this is the thing. I mean, we certainly, a person is due their just wage. And so of course we always think we don’t necessarily want our doctors in the porthouse or we want people to be well cared for in the work they do, but we also don’t want them to walk out being able to buy a Lamborghini from our one surgery. That’s the thing. You can’t put somebody in the poor house for the sake of you making more money. Now, the other part of that problem is it’s actually not the doctor who’s getting that extra, that excess cost in healthcare. In fact, doctors’ wages have been stagnant. And so it’s a very interesting dilemma because it’s really these bureaucratic healthcare systems that are getting that extra dollar, not necessarily the doctors and the nurses. And so again, it goes back to Catholic social teaching. We’re kind creating these balls that are increasing and inflating cost. And I think that it’s high time for that to change. I mean, we can’t keep supporting it. You’re seeing all the reports. Everyone of course, is seeing what’s happening with insurance. Even without the subsidy fight for Obamacare, insurance prices are skyrocketing higher than they ever have in, in this term, going from 25 to 26. And that’s because mostly of cost and it’s something we have to continue to fight against.
Matt Swain (05:37):
Well, there are going to be ways that depending on what side of the aisle people are on, they’re going to argue all kinds of ways to handle healthcare. Of course, you at Solidarity are committed to making sure that healthcare dollars don’t go to immoral services. That’s the one piece of this picture. Another is, should the government run it ,should private groups run it. This is another piece of this picture, but it seems to me that the transparency thing should be a completely nonpartisan question.
Chris Faddis (06:06):
Exactly. Well, and that’s the reality. 90% of Americans, no matter what side of the aisle they’re on, are in favor of transparency. Transparency will inherently drive down costs. There’s of course, some other issues that we could discuss that are driving up costs, but transparency is one of the number one, it will drive down costs. It’ll also just give consumers a sense of peace of mind. I mean, I was hearing from people recently whose child has a serious illness but not a deadly illness. And I heard the numbers that they were told of what it would cost to treat that illness, and it was absurd. And I went to another friend who’s a doctor, and I said, what does it actually take to do this? He’s like, I’ve never heard anything like that number. But in the absence of information, people are telling him these horrible horror stories, and they’re living in fear instead of knowing, Hey, this is likely what the course of action is going to be, chances are it’s going to cost whatever, 30 to 50,000.
(07:02):
They were thinking $300,000. And that’s an unfair game we’re playing. It’s also a, people will avoid treatment because of that unfair game. So I think it is high time. Again, we’ve all said it. You and I have talked about this before. There’s nowhere else in our life that we don’t know what things cost before or during the purchase. And we also do have enough data out there to figure out what is fair and just which is what solidarity does. We end up having to invest a lot of money and data that we can use to say, this procedure is probably worth X because of these factors, and we know this data. It’s just find time for these hospitals and providers to tell us that information.
Matt Swain (07:41):
Well, solidarityhealthshare.org is where you can go to find much more information about what Chris and the group do there. And thank you as always for staying on target and helping to continue this conversation moving forward and bringing our Catholic principals to bear on it.
Chris Faddis (07:56):
Thank you, Matt. Thanks for having us and letting us tell our story.
Matt Swain (07:59):
All right. It is 16 minutes past the hour. We’re back right after this.