Told to pick a health plan on price, a study finds, consumers choose the most expensive option. Is that really surprising?.jpg)
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) funded a study, results of which appear in the journal Health Affairs, that followed 1,421 workers who were given varying levels of information about health insurance plans and asked to pick.
"We found that a substantial minority of the respondents shied away from low-cost providers," say the authors in Health Affairs' March issue, "and even consumers who pay a larger share of their health care costs themselves were likely to equate high cost with high quality."
And that's bad, AHRQ says, because "higher costs may indicate unnecessary services or inefficiencies, so cost information alone does not help consumers get the best value for their health care dollar..."
When the patients were given more information, says AHRQ, they changed metrics.
"When consumers were shown the right mix of cost and quality information," says AHRQ, "they were better able to choose high-value health care providers – defined as those who deliver high-quality care at a lower cost."
They also want consumers to pay attention to "public report cards" and other such quality comparison mechanisms when they make health-care decisions -- though, as we've seen recently in studies of Hospital Compare, public competitive information doesn't necessarily lead to better choices.
The subjects' initial response strikes us as sensible, in that people who live in this society recognize that while price points sometimes float around for marketing reasons, the really high prices go on things that are really valuable -- a Kia may cost more or less than what a Mazda costs, but a Mercedes will always be more expensive.
For more information: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/study-finds-consumers-choose-high-value-health-care-providers-when-given-good-cost-and-quality-information-141496953.html.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22392666?dopt=Abstract