INDIANAPOLIS – U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, the Republican nominee for Indiana governor, made a surprise appearance at the National Healthcare Price Transparency Conference in Indianapolis on Monday, earning recognition for his work on healthcare price transparency on the federal level.
Braun and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont received awards recognizing them as “Champions of Healthcare Price Transparency.” The two, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, worked together on a measure to tackle transparency for hospital and insurer pricing.
“This is reforming the system, not more government spending on it,” Braun said. “I’ll keep pushing hard for the five months I have left in Congress. Hopefully, we‘ll see that cascade further. If I’m successful in November, I’m going to be the most entrepreneurial governor the country’s ever seen on fixing health care.”
Braun’s appearance coincided with the release of the latest hospital prices study by the RAND Corp., which found Indiana’s hospital prices were the 8th-highest in the nation. Also on Monday, the Employers’ Forum of Indiana launched Sage Transparency 2.0, a dashboard providing cost breakdowns and revenue information for hospitals.
Speakers at the conference included entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mark Cuban, national accountant experts, state legislators, and patient advocates. The forum, which hosts the conference, seeks to improve healthcare transparency, prices, and quality with an emphasis on the value for employers.
Indiana’s hospital lobbying organization continued to push back against the RAND analysis, pointing to its data on thin, or even negative, hospital margins and saying the study’s data provided a “distorted” view of prices in Indiana.
“We’ve been rather consistent with criticism about the RAND reports in that they are presented, I think, without the proper context and usually with an agenda,” Indiana Hospital Association President Brian Tabor told the Capital Chronicle. Tabor added, “The study didn’t include the entirety of spending on hospital and health system services, which would put Indiana in the middle of states in terms of costs nationwide.
Read the whole Whitney Downard story for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, here.
