Why Health Care Strategies Have Failed
Remember the theory that easy access to medical services would catch serious conditions early thus avoiding serious and expensive illness later? For example, the cough that turned out to be Pneumonia could be managed early in a physician's office and a a costly hospital stay would be avoided. For that reason, benefit plans put low co-payments on doctor office visits and other everyday care.
When a plan encourages medical care, sometimes lots of medical care will occur for an illness that doesn't need lots of care or that would go away by itself. Remember your father saying, "I don't like to go to doctors, they always find something wrong."
All this testing and treating were intended to bring better health which is less expensive than illness. But the theory seems to break down when it is applied to an entire group of people rather than to one patient.
Consumer-driven health plans, recently introduced in New York, impose a high deductible for medical services. The goal of these plans is to make people wiser consumers by curbing patient demand for certain types of care. By making consumers pay for services, a patient may, for example, choose an x-ray to check out their knee pain vs. going first for an MRI.
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