Consumers for Health Care Choices
Members Articles
The papers below are submitted by members of Consumers for Health Care Choices. They represent the views of the authors only, and not the membership as a whole. Comments by other CHCC members are welcome, but they should be brief and always courteous. Comments and replies are subject to editing before being posted on the site. To comment on one of the papers, please go to the Members Only page.
Would an American family do better by being on Medicare than in a consumer driven health plan? Mr. Pitcher crunches the numbers and concludes that most families would have fewer out of pocket expenses with an HSA/high deductible plan than they would if they were on Medicare.
An experienced insurance agent discusses the lessons learned from five years of marketing HSAs and other forms of consumer choice health plans.
Dr. Reinhardt is a psychologist who is disenchanted with a health care system that offers patients few choices and motivates people with fear rather than hope. She urges consumers to reclaim their personal power in making decisions, rather than ceding those decisions to outside "experts" whose own priorities may not meet the best interests of the patient.
Dr. Pendleton is a retired psychiatrist who applies his knowledge of learning behavior to the field of health economics. He proposes a new form of health insurance to accompany Health Savings Account programs. Currently, most of the high deductible health plans that are required to go with an HSA are the exact same PPO and HMO type coverages that existed before HSAs were enacted. Dr. Pendleton describes a benefit design that would bring the same dynamics of consumer choice and financial incentives of the HSA to the insurance that applies to the high-cost side of coverage package.
Jim Porterfield is fairly new to health care, though he has been with the American Farm Bureau Federation since 1978. His attendence at last spring’s CDHCC conference in Chicago was eye-opening for him.. He was amazed at the depth and breadth of innovations and activities all clustered under the banner of Consumer Driven Health Care. This paper is a tour of some of those activities
Dr. LaGrelius has been dealing with Medicare all his professional life. He entered medical school two months after President Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965. He has watched as Medicare has grown to include new groups of beneficiaries and new benefits, and most recently the new Rx drug benefit. He notes that Medicare has always covered its rapidly growing costs by raising taxes and cutting payments, which take a toll on both young working families and the physicians who provide services. He goes on to discuss a number of solutions that could help Medicare become more efficient and cost-effective.
Dr. Zwelling-Aamot (known as "Dr. Z" by her patients) is very concerned about the recent jury verdict in Texas against the drug manufacturer Merck over its pain medication Vioxx. In her paper, "Vioxx and Consumersim in Healthcare," she argues that such verdicts do the health care sytem far more harm than good. They are often based more on emotions and anti-drug company attitudes than on any evidence showing that the product caused the damage in question. Even when there are clear risks, she argues, patients should be allowed to make an informed choice to balance those risks against the benefits.
