Employers must push for more cost-effective health care
Need/Opportunity
Rising healthcare costs continue to be a top concern for employers, and improving the delivery and quality of health care is often discussed as a way to reduce those costs. When a Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) report showed that insurers made widely differing payments to hospitals in Western Pennsylvania for the same cardiac procedures, regardless of the outcomes, employers were hit with yet another concern about their employee health plans and the quality of the services they are buying. Highmark, the region's dominant insurer, PHC4, and the two largest healthcare providers - UPMC and West Penn Allegheny Health System - were central to the ongoing media coverage and dialogue. The employer's voice was largely unheard.
The Pittsburgh Business Group on Health is an employer-led coalition advocating for value and quality in health care and benefits. As such, PBGH needed to join the public discussion about the cardiac surgery reimbursement report. With such corporate heavyweights as H.J. Heinz Company, Westinghouse Electric Company and Bayer Corporation among its roster of members, PBGH should be viewed as a major player in the healthcare cost debate.
The PHC4 study presented a clear opportunity to raise PBGH's visibility and position itself in the employer community's eyes as a driver of value and quality in health care and benefits. It also presented the opportunity for the collective voice of regional employers - spoken through PBGH - to call for greater transparency in healthcare costs and quality.
Intended Audiences
- Executive decision makers at large, mid-size and small organizations in various business segments, including private and public employers, government and academia.
- Executives at regional health systems
- Executives at regional health insurers
- Employee benefits experts
- Healthcare consultants
Objectives
Through a wide-reaching forum, PBGH aimed to insert itself into the specific public discussion of cardiac surgery reimbursement while using the issue as a springboard to broach the broader topic of transparency in the cost and quality of health care. In doing so, it hoped to raise its level of visibility among its audiences and demonstrate its value as an advocate to existing members.
PBGH planned to:
- use the issue to bridge to discuss the power of an employer coalition;
- communicate to prospective members the cost savings they can achieve in prescription drug and health benefits through PBGH plans; and
- demonstrate to its audiences the relationships and leverage PBGH can achieve with regional health insurers and prescription drug plans.
Project Description
WordWrite Communications employed its experienced staff of media relations experts and former journalists to first pitch the opinion piece idea to select media.
Having gotten strong interest from the media pitching efforts, WordWrite worked with PBGH to draft a concise, clear opinion piece and letter that addressed the findings in the PHC4 report from the employer perspective. Both pieces highlighted PBGH and its work on behalf of employers while tying the report's findings to the crisis in healthcare costs.
Both articles made the point that inequality in reimbursement for healthcare services, regardless of quality, contributes to escalating healthcare costs. The pieces questioned the justification for the differences in payments and called on employers to act by using their collective power to ensure that their employees received quality health care at fair prices - in essence, a call for transparency.
Results
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette printed a 650-word opinion piece under PBGH Executive Director Chris Whipple's byline. The article ran in the Forum section of the Sunday edition, reaching an estimated 842,755 readers. The piece also was posted to the Post-Gazette's web site, which attracts an estimated 3.2 million unique users per month.
The Pittsburgh Business Times printed a 500-word letter to the editor, reaching 12,500 subscribers and 45,000 overall readers, the majority of whom are considered top management in their respective organizations.
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