Chair Schulman (for Speaker Menin) on Office of Healthcare Accountability

Okay, so the speaker had to be called away.

She asked me to ask the questions that she wanted to ask, so I'm going to ask on her behalf.

The Office of Healthcare Accountability was established in June 2024 through the Healthcare Accountability and Consumer Protection Act, which the speaker spearheaded while serving as chair of the Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection.

The office was created to examine healthcare costs across New York City, improve transparency in healthcare pricing and spending, and identify strategies.

To reduce costs for patients and the healthcare system overall.

The fiscal 2025 adopted budget added $2 million and 15 positions to DOHMH's budget for the Office of Healthcare Accountability, but no additional funding was added to support the office in the preliminary and executive plans.

Pursuant to Local Law 78, the office is required to publish an annual report detailing its findings, analyses, and recommendations, which is required to be released by January 1st.

What progress has the Office of Healthcare Accountability made since it was established?

Yeah, first of all, just thank you to the speaker for her leadership on this issue.

We don't think you can have a conversation about affordability in this city without talking about health care, and we don't think you can hold health care systems accountable without a body like this, the Office of Health Care Accountability.

You know, the thing that I would say right up front is the tool that we were able to release last December, the price comparison tool, offers New Yorkers an ability to check

the price of 30-something, you know, common procedures and services.

And this gives us, gives New Yorkers the insight that they need to make decisions about where they should go for their care.

Secondly, yes, we're hard at work at the annual report.

We have an agreed-upon deadline with the speaker to make sure that we get that out the door.

by August 1st.

And so we will be working with her, her team, and with council to make sure that we get the information that we need to do with regard to the annual report.

Let me pause there.

Much more I could say on the office, but I know you may have other questions.

And the portal that you were talking about, do we know how many people, I know we asked this during the preliminary budget hearings, how many people have used it?

How are we marketing it?

That kind of stuff.

Yeah, 15,000 people have used it.

Okay.

And yes, we are absolutely singing praises of this site from the rooftop.

I think it's an incredibly effective tool, and folks should get online and should use it.

You can just Google search price transparency tool, New York City Health Department.

You should put it out in one of your wonderful tweets that you always put out.

Honestly, that's not a bad idea.

Has the office identified opportunities to reduce health care costs or improve affordability for New Yorkers?

Yeah, we're hard at work trying to identify the intersection between the four key areas that we're trying to address with affordability and this office.

So area one is Medicaid coverage and helping individuals who are at risk of losing their Medicaid stay covered.

Number two is benefit enrollment, so cash assistance benefits like SNAP, WIC, EITC, helping individuals get those benefits.

The third is medical debt.

trying to erase or prevent as much of it as possible.

And the third is eviction prevention.

So we're looking right now at this sort of intersection between what the office has done and what the office can do to address these four areas.

And I'm personally very excited about the ability to leverage this entity to accomplish some of our goals for affordability.

How many of the 15 budgeted positions are currently filled?

Currently, we have 12 of the 15 filled.

We have three remaining slots.

These are some of the slots that I mentioned earlier, highly technical medical economist slots.

And so we're looking not to just fill the roles.

We want to have the right person in each of those roles.

So if council has quality candidates, we'd be looking to interview them and potentially bring them on board.