The Legislature should require hospitals to report this information to the new office. And independent council of purchasers, consumers and health care providers should advise the office on which types of data would be most useful and provide guidance on other issues. In addition, the state law prohibiting the publication of financial information about individual hospitals should be changed to allow the distribution of treatment costs for specific illness groups. The purpose of this proposal is simply to provide a history of the costs of specific services and outcomes of the treatment, after adjusting for severe illnesses, levels of indigent care and other special circumstances, so that consumers and purchasers can make more informed choices. Improving state health purchasing.
State government is the Texas health care industry's largest single customer.
Much of the money goes for goods and services without effective planning or performance measures in place to determine whether taxpayers are getting their money's worth. But Band-Aids are the least of the state's worries. The Texas Commission for the Blind doesn't break down it medical spending by any recognizable category, including who uses what. The Texas Rehabilitation Commission can't report specifically how much its spends for the most basic areas, such as physician care or lab tests. Workers' compensation programs use outdated billing codes, increasing the paperwork burden of providers and making it impossible to make accurate comparisons among state programs.