Consumerism: The Rediscovery of a Healthcare Movement
There are several factors that have promoted the renewed interest in healthcare consumerism. Circumstances such as the recession of 2009 promoted the call for cost containment in 2010, especially in health care benefits. Encouraging employee consumerism through consumer directed health plans and other strategies can be enhanced by incentives, but federal efforts in reference to health care reform add some element of uncertainty to the consumer-directed solution.
This paper will provide some background and insight into the course of action being taken by patients/employees and employers considering implementing a consumerist approach to improve employee health and control the cost trend. Where the consumer must consider all the factors – communication, policy, CDHPs, and behavior – of consumerism to continually move the concept forward and remain viable in the efforts to contain rising health care cost.
CONSUMERISM 3 Consumerism: The Rediscovery of a Healthcare Movement Key factors contributing to the rise of health care costs include poor lifestyle choices, the aging population, costly new technology and drugs, and overtreatment. Reducing health care costs that are rising faster than inflation requires powerful solutions that can make a deep impact on the cost trend.
Past recessions gave rise to innovative, often untested, new solutions such as point-of-service plans and managed care. The recession of 2009 hit so hard it led to a similar path for companies. Employers responding to Mercer’s 2009 Survey on Recession and Reform indicated that their 2009 costs were rising greater than previously predicted and they have to reduce expenses. Several employers stated they would use “tried and true” cost management techniques such as increasing plan design cost sharing and contributions (Domaszewicz, 2010).
The question now became why wouldn’t all employers take such an approach? Some employers felted they had shifted cost as much as possible. Others were worried about health care reform proposals that would require them to reduce employee cost sharing, so increasing their costs would not be a practical long term solution.
The next option for employers’ defense against rate increases would be shifting cost to employees, but this approach presented a difficult task for employers that felt their employee cost sharing requirements were already high. With 70-80% of health care services costs being paid by someone else (the health plan and/or employer) the health care market is the only sector in our economy where consumers do not customarily compare price and quality. One of the intentions of consumerism is to begin to change this dynamic.
Consumer driven health plans were designed to make the cost of health care services more transparent for the consumer. This is done by replacing copays with deductibles, coinsurance and accounts, which take the form of either health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) or health savings accounts (HSAs) (Sharon, 20
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