This new post by Gregory Curfman appears on the Health Affairs Blog in a series stemming from the Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Monday, January 23, 2017.
With health care spending approaching 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), controlling health care costs is a top priority not only for the federal government, but also the individual states. To develop successful strategies for cost control, states need comprehensive data on utilization of and spending on health care services. Medicare data are valuable but not representative of the entire national population or of the prices that private payers pay. In private insurance, prices are not under administrative control as they are in Medicare, and they vary widely in different geographic regions.
All-payer claims databases (APCDs) were developed, first in Maryland in 1995, to provide comprehensive state-level data on health-care utilization and spending, and there are now 16 APCDs nationwide. As the name implies, APCDs collect data from all payers, and the spending data reflect the actual negotiated prices of services. Thus, APCDs are a valuable source of information for state health policymakers and health services researchers. For example, in Massachusetts, the Health Policy Commission uses the state’s APCD to set state-wide health care spending targets, which have been important in achieving state cost control. […]
Read the full post here!
