Jim Frogue, the state project director for Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, has proposed an idea that worth’s considering.
In recent testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, Frogue suggested a way to bring the transparency movement to Medicaid.
Transparency in government—which we discussed in the last TaxByte in relation to state budgets—is the notion that the public should have access to information about what politicians and others who spend taxpayer money are doing with those funds.
The federal-state Medicaid program provides health coverage for some 52 million Americans at a cost of about $330 billion (for 2007). And we know Medicaid is fraught with sub-quality care and fraud.
As Frogue points out in a recent analysis of one state’s Medicaid program:
- Only 17 percent of women over the age of 50 were getting the recommended annual mammogram;
- 4,000 people had gotten six or more Oxycontin prescriptions;
- Less than half the children had gotten well-child checkups, and;
- One person had visited the emergency room 405 times in three years.
So how do we shine a light on some of this data so the public can find it and demand some accountability from our elected representatives?
Frogue suggests requesting the states release Medicaid patient-encounter data and posting that information on the Internet.
We would have to “de-identify” the information so that patients’ names cannot be linked with their specific data. But Frogue thinks that most of the information is already being collected and the processes to make it available are available.
If it could be done, the public would begin to see utilization patterns and even identify egregious excesses. And that would force politicians to find ways to address some of these bad patterns — which they don’t have to do now until some enterprising journalist exposes a problem.
But there is another reason for doing something along these lines: All the government-run health care advocates use the public’s ignorance of the problems in Medicare and Medicaid to their advantage, allowing those advocates to claim the government can provide better health care for less money — without being seriously challenged.
Anyone who knows the problems in Medicaid knows that’s not true. And a little transparency will help us make that case.