A recent
Healthcare Affordability State Policy Scorecard
from Altarum Healthcare Value Hub found Maryland to be among the nation’s top ranked states in health care affordability outcomes and policy efforts. Our state’s results were favorable overall including the following:
#1 Making Out-Of-Pocket Costs Affordable
We have strong regulations and systems in place to help Marylanders deal with health care costs. However, as we see growth of health plans with a higher percentage of cost sharing, or effectively “no insurance” for larger dollar amounts, consumers continue to be burdened with higher costs.
#1 Policy Efforts to Reduce Low Value Care
Maryland is one of only two states to receive a perfect policy score. Not only do we have strong hospital payment policies that reward high quality and high value service, our unique arrangement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spurs hospitals to reduce low value care.
#2 Affordability
Maryland ranks best out of the 42 states, plus Washington, DC, studied for having the lowest percentage of adults facing health care affordability problems. The scorecard does point out that even in high scoring states like ours, one in four adults still report healthcare affordability burdens.
#2 Lowest in Private Payer Prices
Our Maryland Model contract prevents cost shifting for hospital services. As an all-payer state, patients pay out of pocket at the same prices as Medicare, Medicaid and commercial health plans.
Though no state earned a perfect score overall, the scorecard finds that every state has made a degree of progress. The highest ranked state, Massachusetts, still needs to enact stronger protections against surprise medical bills and to reduce the cost of high value care.
Altarum, a nonprofit research and consulting organization that looks at solutions to advance health among vulnerable and publicly insured populations, used a dataset that compiles state-level activity related to both policy and outcome measures across four areas of healthcare affordability:
- Extending affordable coverage to all residents
- Ensuring that cost-sharing is affordable and evidence-based
- Reducing the provision of low- and no-value care
- Curbing excess healthcare prices