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Study Says Better Online Transparency Tools, Apps Could Ease Fear of Lower-Cost Healthcare
You get what you pay for: That old saw applies to most corners of American consumerism, but not to healthcare. Convincing people of that is tough.
You get what you pay for: That old saw applies to most corners of American consumerism, but not to healthcare. Convincing people of that is tough.
The research shows that most Americans believe more-expensive healthcare is usually better—an assumption that has become one major driver of unnecessary costs plaguing the U.S. healthcare system. And researchers say it will take more than just high out-of-pocket costs borne by consumers to change their views.
“People are afraid of the low-cost option because they are afraid of substandard care,” said Judith Hibbard, a senior researcher at the University of Oregon and renowned scholar on consumerism in healthcare, whose comments Tuesday came during a presentation in Chicago at the Operations and Technology Forum held by America's Health Insurance Plans.
The trick to alleviating the fear of lower-cost healthcare is to show Americans the cost of their care alongside the relevant quality rankings for potential providers they could visit. And many of the existing healthcare transparency tools could stand to improve in this regard, according to a study out Wednesday from Catalyst for Payment Reform, a not-for-profit organization that works on behalf of large employers and other healthcare purchasers.
Read the full story here: http://bit.ly/1aINrOv
Source: Modern Healthcare
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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