Dr Bruce Sherman: Adding Nuance Can Make Value-Based Insurance Design More Impactful for Employers

Making benefit design more nuanced through the inclusion of employee variables could help increase the impact of value-based insurance design for employers, said Bruce Sherman, MD, chief medical officer of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

Transcript

How is value-based insurance design looking among employers? Are they interested in it?

There’s still a lot we don’t know about value-based insurance design, and as much as it seems like a great idea, and I think operationally it is for the right people, I think the impact we’re seeing is not as great as it potentially can be, in that the structure of value-based insurance design as a one-size-fits-all offering for everyone may not be as impactful as perhaps more nuanced, to use a Mark Fendrick word, as nuanced a delivery as perhaps thinking about more advanced, admittedly complicated or potentially complicated, approaches to value-based insurance design. It could be for example incorporating wage or household income as a variable in benefit design or value-based insurance design structure.