If you’ve ever had a health problem and wondered how much treatment might cost, New Mexico State Health Authorities have created a website where you can find and compare the costs others have already paid for it.

It is called Database of all payer claims.

It was presented to all New Mexicans on Monday during the House Interim Committee on Health and Human Services meeting.

In New Mexico, for example, a COVID-19 test costs an average of $33, according to the database, but can cost as much as $125.

You can search the database for a specific medical treatment or provider. Enter your zip code and you can see what the database shows for anyone living in Gallup, Clovis, Mora or Chaparral. Anywhere in the state, actually.

The site’s goal is to make medical billing more transparent and identify trends in how much people use and pay for health care. Some policymakers hope the site’s data will help them keep health care costs under control in the future.

The database contains data from 160 million health insurance claims filed by nearly 1.5 million people in New Mexico between January 2020 and March 2024, according to a presentation by Patrick Allen, state health minister, on Monday.

State law requires providers such as clinics and hospitals as well as payers such as insurance companies to hand over the data to government agencies.

Providers can use the database to compare themselves with others, insurance companies can compare their costs to a national average and policy makers can use it to understand the impact of allocating public money to a particular part of the health care system, Allen told the committee.

Controlling health care costs

While the publicly available portal attempts to answer simple and direct questions, the full database is much more detailed and could be made available to the committee for decision-making, Allen said.

Senator Martin Hickey (D-Albuquerque) asked Allen if he would share the data with the House Finance Committee, which oversees the state budget.

He urged officials on the legislature’s Finance Committee to make sure they get all the raw data from the state Department of Health so they can eventually figure out the reasons for rising health care costs and try to find ways to get them under control.

Hickey referred to the Oregon Health Authority Target program for sustainable cost growth in the healthcare system One example is a state in Oregon where authorities can penalize insurance companies or health care providers whose prices increase by more than a target rate of 3% per year.

“We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to focus on health care costs so that we can get to that 3%, like other states,” Hickey said. “But LFC needs to have that data. They have the expertise to be able to do the analysis.”

The New Mexico Department of Health does not share the data with state financial officials at the LFC, Allen said, “but we should be able to.”

Hickey pressed Allen to commit to sharing the data, and Allen said this was “subject to the execution of an appropriate data use agreement.”

Lawmakers need to analyze how public money is spent so they can validate it and take policy action based on that, Hickey said. “They can’t just rely on the executive branch’s interpretation,” he said.

Years of work

The New Mexico data comes from 21 private insurance companies and the state health insurance systems Medicare and Medicaid, according to a presentation to lawmakers on Monday.

“I know from previous discussions that you have all been thinking and working on this for a very long time,” Allen said.

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham appointed him to the position last year.

The New Mexico Department of Health created an initial plan for the database in 2016, the presentation said. Lawmakers allocated money to build the database in 2019, and state agencies requested the data from providers and insurance companies in 2023.

Allen said his agency will work to obtain more comprehensive data and update the public portal to add a Spanish version.

The database does not include claims from statutory federal health insurance, employer-sponsored insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, charitable benefits, or self-paid or uninsured benefits.

There have been further attempts by lawmakers to make health care costs more transparent.

In 2019, the House of Representatives passed a The invoice This was intended to prevent patients from being billed for treatment “out of network” even if they went to a location within their insurance network.

This bill failed before it came to a vote in the Senate.