Dan Gorenstein writes this must-read for Kaiser Health News, highlighting one research physician’s personal experience on a high deductible health plan when he had an emergency, and how it plays into his research on HDHPs and consumer health.
Read the full original article from Kaiser Health News.
Ashish K. Jha is Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and a practicing Internal Medicine physician at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Even with all of his experience, he still rolled the dice on a possible heart attack to avoid a large emergency room bill on his HDHP.
“Last year, Amitabh Chandra (a fellow Harvard health policy economist) and three colleagues looked at what happened after a Fortune 100 company switched 75,000 well-paid, tech-savvy employees into high-deductible plans. What they found closely mirrored Ashish Jha’s personal pattern. Workers — both the healthy and the sick — skipped out on care indiscriminately. “Prevention, imaging, or drugs, consumers were cutting back on all those,” Chandra said.”
The article goes on to discuss how healthcare “consumers” aren’t really consumers in the traditional sense of economy, and most, even after years on a HDHP, still don’t know how to shop around for the best price.
Employers can help their employees get effective care at an affordable cost by knowing the best healthcare options available for their organization. Learn more about those options in our guide, Know Your Options: Best Practices for Employee Healthcare Purchasing:
