Consumer-Directed Health Care

There are many good sources describing and explaining what exactly is meant by the term “consumer-directed health care.” The best starting place for an introduction to consumer-directed health care and the policy decisions surrounding it is an article by John C. Goodman, a leading expert in the field, called What is Consumer-Directed Health Care? Comparing Patient Power with other Decision Mechanisms. Gary Claxton from KaiserEdu also gives an excellent explanation of consumer-directed health care in an audiocast tutorial that goes a little more in depth. If webcasts are what you are looking for, Fox News Interactive and Health Politics with Mike Magee each have short videocasts that address the topic. In addition to the tutorial, KaiserEdu also has a background brief that gives the broad definition of consumer-directed health care, but the first two sources are better if you really want to explore CDHC. RAND offers a longer discussion of what CDHC is, and also branches out into many of the other issues surrounding consumer-driven healthcare. Consumer Driven Health Benefits: A Continuing Evolution? by the Employee Benefit Research Institute also provides a more in depth discussion of the topic as a whole.

There are many good sources on this topic that all focus around the same general argument. John C. Goodman’s What is Consumer-Directed Health Care? Comparing Patient Power with other Decision Mechanisms discusses the general reasons why America needs to move away from the current health system, and explains why consumer-directed health care is best option to replace the current system. Along the same lines, Consumer-Directed Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost (executive summary) discusses the need for reducing health care costs and explains how CDHC is intended to help lower these costs. Another article focusing on how consumer-directed health care can solve problems like inflated insurance costs that current plans and policy create is Consumer-Directed Health Plans and The RAND Health Insurance Experiment by Joseph P. Newhouse. Possibly the most informative resource explaining why there is movement towards consumer-directed health care is “Consumer-Directed” Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost. A publication by the Ethan Allen Institute offers a unique presentation of this topic by walking through the entire history of the health insurance field and explaining how it has evolved into CDHC oriented health care. The 2005 and 2006 versions of the annual EBRI Benefits Conference add even more first-hand insight, and a report from the Government Accountability Office is ideal for a longer exploration of the subject.

The KaiserEDU background brief is a good place to start as it offers a very broad introduction to most of the arguments for as well as against consumer-directed health care. Once a broad understanding is achieved, a longer resource that expand on the topic is “Consumer-Directed” Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost. Another longer resource, Health Savings Accounts: Do Critics Have a Point? addresses in depth the leading arguments for Health Savings Accounts, a very common type of consumer-directed health care, focusing on the role HSAs play in restoring market forces and making medical markets more efficient. Another short publication analyzing this topic is Consumer-Directed Health Plans and The RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which gives a unique argument in support of implementation of CDHC that presents the idea of coupling cost sharing with managed care, but this should not be looked at until some of the other sources presenting more basic arguments are looked at. Two detailed reports on the topic that should be read for a full understanding are Consumer Driven Health Benefits: A Continuing Evolution? and Consumer-Driven Health Care: Beyond Rhetoric with Research and Experience. In a Fox News Interview, David Levitz, vice president of GCG Financial, also adds his opinions as to why consumer-directed health care is beneficial to America.

Most source focus on the same general arguments against consumer-directed health care, but present them in different ways. For a broad introduction to the reasons against consumer-directed health care, read the background brief offered by KaiserEDU. After this, two longer policy syntheses, “Consumer-Directed” Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost and Health Savings Accounts: Do Critics Have a Point? are excellent sources to look at to expand on what KaiserEdu presents. Consumer Driven Health Benefits: A Continuing Evolution? offers possibly the best explanation of the arguments both for and against consumer-directed health care, and goes very in depth.

There are very mixed reports among the sources as to the effectiveness of consumer-directed health care. Consumer-Directed Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost (executive summary)] introduces the basic trends in health care caused by CDHC plans. [[http://www.chcf.org/documents/insurance/ConsumerDirHealthPlansQualityCost.pdf|“Consumer-Directed” Health Plans: Implications for Care Quality and Cost and The Promise of Consumer Driven Health Care are two longer sources that take a fairly neutral approach. A report from the National Council on Disability, Consumer-Directed Healthcare: How Well Does it Work?, is a very in depth analysis of the effectiveness of consumer-directed health care, especially as it applies to disabled Americans. Consumer-Driven Health Care: Beyond Rhetoric with Research and Experience offers a very pro-consumer-directed health care performance evaluation that goes very in depth. There is also an audiocast that addresses the topic of how consumer-directed health care is working, but you must buy it to hear it. A better option than this that also gives first-hand statistics would be to watch the videocasts of the 2005 and 2006 EBRI Benefits Conferences.

Consumer Tools for Self-Diagnosis

A growing number of symptom-checkers are available for consumers to determine whether to seek professional medical advice.

• WebMD. Symptom Checker
• Mayo Clinic. Symptom Checker
• American Academy of Pediatrics. healthychildren.org Symptom Checker
• iTriage. Users can select either an avatar to select a body part or symptom list.
• A.D.A.M. provides decision support products for hospitals, health plans and consumer web portals, including a symptom-checker.
• The A.D.A.M. Illustrated Medical Encyclopedia is a comprehensive A-Z reference of 3,600 medical topics complete with thousands of full color illustrations to make understanding complex medical topics easier. This comprehensive encyclopedia covers common medical procedures, symptoms, treatments and much more in a consumer-friendly reading style. Step-by-step descriptions of common medical procedures and treatments, lists of symptoms, warnings, tests and results, prevention and more are highlighted with 4,000 award-winning A.D.A.M. illustrations.

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• MSA Weblinks (policy.com)
• MSA Summary: Guidelines for Medical Savings Accounts (The HMO Page)
• Medical Savings Accounts: A Policy Analysis (Urban Institute: March 1996)
• Medical Savings Accounts (National Center for Policy Analysis)
• Consumer Issues (Health Affairs topics page)