A consumer-driven future: When patients call the shots

An introduction to consumer-driven health care, what it is and what it means for you.

By Julie A. Jacob, AMNews staff. Sept. 23/30, 2002.

It's the mantra of corporations, health plans and even many physicians: If people just knew the actual cost of health care, they would be smarter about how they use the system and more engaged in ensuring their own wellness. Everyone would save a lot of time and money.

Now those who support medical savings accounts and other forms of so-called consumer-driven health care are about to find out if their gospel is truth.

In the face of rapidly increasing premiums for health plans that seem to offer fewer and fewer services, employeers and other payers increasingly are willing to purchase, or at least consider, plans in which consumers contribute a set amount toward their own health care costs. Consumer-driven health care is no longer the future; it is now.

Consumer-driven health care encompasses a variety of employee health benefit models, such as plans where employees:

• Are given a set amount of money each month to pay for their health care premiums, have an array of different health plans from which to choose and are responsible for paying the balance of premiums that exceed the company's contribution to the cost.
• Are given a personal spending account combined with a high-deductible health plan.
• Design their own health plan by picking from among several different networks of physicians and hospitals and setting their own premiums, deductibles and co-payments.