Health care price regulation and public options: Assessing approaches to increasing the public role

In light of the major financial burden that health care places on many households and the limited competition in many health care markets, some policymakers and experts have called for governments to play a larger role in determining the prices of health care services, such as by regulating those prices or introducing a public option. The late Uwe Reinhardt wrote and spoke for many years in support of a larger role for the public sector in determining health care prices.

On September 23, the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy and the Center on Regulation and Markets at Brookings, in honor of Uwe’s work, hosted the second of three webinars examining whether a larger public role is appropriate.

This panel examined three commonly discussed approaches to expanding the government’s role in determining health care prices in private insurance markets: (1) limits on out-of-network prices; (2) comprehensive price regulation; and (3) creating a public option. The panelists discussed how the effects of these different policy approaches might differ from each other and how they might compare to an approach that focused solely on improving competition in provider markets.

Viewers submitted question for panelists by emailing events@brookings.edu or via Twitter with #HealthCarePrices.