by James A. Bacon
Yesterday I blogged about the All-Payer Claims Database, which has the potential to provide unprecedented insight into medical outcomes and charges in Virginia. By consolidating medical claims data for hundreds of millions of health claims, the database will enable employers, insurers and hospitals to conduct analytical studies that were impossible previously.
There is a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes regarding the database, as I have learned from an informed source whom I will not quote because we were chatting informally and he might have thought we were off the record.
Participation in the database is voluntary, so it took years of coaxing and wrangling to persuade Virginia’s private insurance companies to relinquish their data. Anthem Blue Cross-Blue Shield, the state’s largest insurer, is the most ambivalent about the project. With more than one million Virginia customers, its database is big enough that it can go solo with the kind of analysis people envision for the statewide database. That ability confers it a significant competitive advantage over its smaller rivals. If Anthem dropped out, the value of the statewide database would diminish significantly. Accordingly, the General Assembly may consider legislation in 2016 to make participation mandatory.
That raises an interesting philosophical question: Is it justifiable for state government to mandate the sharing of outcomes data? In an era in which data confers tremendous marketplace power, any such mandate would penalize Anthem. The insurer could advance a plausible argument that a requisitioning of its data would amount to an uncompensated seizure of valuable property — property far more valuable than its office buildings, computer networks and other tangible assets.
But Anthem’s right to protect its property from government seizure conflicts with the public good that can be achieved through the sharing of data. The bigger and more comprehensive the database, the greater the benefits to public health that can be achieved by mining it.
Politicians comfortable with the exercise of state power will have no moral or philosophical compunction about extracting the data from Anthem against its wishes. But what of conservatives and libertarians who respect private property and distrust the arbitrary exercise of government power? Should we insist that any sharing be voluntary? Or should we compel Anthem to share?
I think there is a case to be made for mandated data sharing on conservative/ libertarian grounds that it can drive market-based reforms of Virginia’s health system. Health care in America is not a market-based system, it is a corporatist system negotiated between the federal government, hospitals, insurers, physicians and pharmaceutical companies. Prices are opaque to the patient-consumer. Accountability is so diffused throughout the system as to be meaningless. Making price and quality data available to the public, formatted in such a way that the public can understand it and act upon it, is essential to creating a market-based system.
But price and quality data are only part of the picture. Virginia has other state-level barriers to a market-based system, including the Certificate of Public Need (COPN), which restricts competition, and state-imposed insurance mandates, which force insurers to offer expensive plans with broad benefits. Price transparency cannot by itself drive the transformation to a competitive, market-based system. But as part of a bundle of reforms including the repeal of COPN and insurance mandates, data sharing could bring about a net gain in freedom, competitiveness and prosperity that would appeal to the conservative conscience.
