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Workers Ungrateful for Empowerment to Pay More

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By MICHAEL MILLENSON

6a00d8341c909d53ef0115702ff0f9970b-pi American workers sure are ungrateful.A new report by the National Business Group on Health (NBGH) says that 27 percent of insured workers are skipping health care treatments to avoid co-payments, 20 percent of employees are not taking their prescriptions as advised by their doctors, and 17 percent of employees are cutting their pills in half to make them last longer.Yet rather than expressing gratitude for the opportunity to express their consumer-driven preferences, and rather than praising the benefits consultants and conservative think-tank talkers who have given them the chance to have “skin in the game,” 58 percent of those surveyed said they “continue to be surprised” at their out-of-pocket costs. Obviously, they haven’t been attending conferences of HR execs, or they’d know that one man’s “cost shifting” is another man’s “empowerment of my employees.”It turns out that shopping for health care is not like shopping for a refrigerator and that changing co-pays and deductibles has to be undertaken with a great deal of care. Workers, hard-pressed financially by a deep recession, workers are not craftily eliminating unnecessary and non-evidence-based care. Instead, they’re pill splitting or skipping the pills entirely. This is precisely what the landmark RAND Health Insurance Experiment research on copayments and deductibles predicted more than two decades ago, which would be no surprise had the study consistently been quoted honestly by all proponents of the so-called consumer-driven health plans.

Of course, what goes around, comes around. Since 68 percent of employees say that having access to health benefits is a key reason for staying with their employer, it will be that same employer who picks up the tab for the consumer-driven diabetic who has to drive her consumer self to the emergency room because she couldn’t afford her medication. However, the good news is that a majority of workers polled said financial incentives from their employers have motivated them to try to lead a healthier lifestyle.In fact, about half of workers now agree that fat people and smokers ought to pay higher premiums. That’s only fair. And I think guys who have personal trainers and executive physicals should pay less, too, don’t you? Oh, wait. That wasn’t on the questionnaire.Why not just eliminate health insurance altogether and instead give every worker a shiny apple a day? (To keep the doctor away, of course.) If any HR execs, benefits consultants or conservative policy wonks out there would like to adopt this proposal, you can call it One More Fruity Idea for Health Care.

Consumer-Driven Health Care: Promise and Performance

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By ROBERT LASZEWSKI

I am always struck by the difference between the salesmanship of health plans offering consumer-driven health products and the reality of the data.

James Robinson and Paul Ginsburg have an article in the January 27th edition of Health Affairs with an objective review of the consumer-driven movement of recent years.

Here is the central point of the article:

The performance of consumer-driven health care has fallen short of both the aspirations of its proponents and the fears of its critics. Growth of the favored organizational forms, including HDHPs and individually purchased insurance, has been anemic. The forms of insurance and sponsorship originally embodied in the consumer-driven vision have mutated into forms far from those originally envisaged. This process is not unique to consumerism, but one well known to managed care, where the original group-/staff-model HMO was diluted into the loosely structured independent practice association (IPA)-model plan and the sponsorship framework of managed competition into the “total replacement” purchasing format of self-insured employers.

They also point out that:

  • Enrollment in HDHP/HSA plans grew from 400,000 in September 2004 to 6.1 million in January 2008–“a large absolute increase but still small in relation to overall enrollment in private insurance.” By comparison, HMOs continue to hold 20 percent of the employer market and POS plans 12 percent.
  • “The consumer-driven health care movement has been obliged to dilute its principles in light of the overuse of inappropriate services and underuse of appropriate services in the real world. HDHPs now incorporate elements of disease management for enrollees with chronic conditions; case management for enrollees with complex or comorbid conditions; and utilization management for patients using particularly costly drugs, devices, or procedures. Most of these medical management programs are obtained from the same diversified insurers that offer HMO and PPO products. Indeed, the potential for integration with claims databases is leading insurers to acquire many formerly independent medical management vendors.”
  • “The blind spot in the consumer-driven analysis of market performance concerns the importance of coordination in insurance, delivery, and sponsorship. The obdurate insistence on á la carte choice and retail purchasing pushed the theorists of consumerism into positing organizational and market dynamics that have not been observed in the real world.”

Consumer-driven principles have clearly impacted the design of mainstream health insurance plans for the better.

But consumer-driven principles have not changed the fundamental dynamics of our health insurance system nor have they turned out to be a silver-bullet solution.

In my mind, the fundamental fault with the logic that they would be was the belief that consumers could do what insurance companies, employer benefit managers, and even providers could not.

Robert Laszweski has been a fixture in Washington health policy circles for the better part of three decades. He currently serves as the president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates of Alexandria, Virginia. Before forming HPSA in 1992, Robert served as the COO, Group Markets, for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. You can read more of his thoughtful analysis of healthcare industry trends at Health Policy and Marketplace Blog, where this post first appeared.