Question

Identify, assess, and offer recommendations for a range of current "health care consumerism" issues.

Answer 1

Ans) The future of market-oriented health policy and practice lies in “managed consumerism,” a blend of the patient-centric focus of consumer-driven health care and the provider-centric focusof managed competition.

- Health care consumerism is defined as “a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts”.

- Healthcare Consumerism is about transforming an employer’s health benefit plan into one that places economic purchasing power and decision-making in the those of participants.

- It isabout providing the information and decision support tools they need, along with financial incentives, rewards, and other benefits that inspire personal involvement in modifying health andhealthcare purchasing behaviors. Some consider this is best accomplished by providing employees with the decision-making information and support instruments they need, along with financial incentives, rewards and other benefits that promote personal engagement in altering health and health care purchasing behaviors. One fact that is problematic in dealing with managing health care is that people are living longer with more complex chronic diseases associated with advances in technology and medical interventions.

- By the same token, health care expenditures have sky-rocketed due to progress in technologies, treatments, pharmaceuticals, and consumer’s expectations for rapid, quality health care that is cost-effective, accessible, and comprehensible. Recent trends and advances in medical interventions, enhanced use of technology, greater demands and expectations by consumers, and a transformation from the acute-care model to the chronic-care model due to the aging population has led to a change in a more consumer-oriented or consumer-driven health care system.

- For advocates of market-oriented health care, these are the best of times and the worst of times. Managed competition and consumerism each offer to help hands on, proposing organizational, contractual, and regulatory bases to improve information, align incentives, and maximize the efficiency of care. Consumerism attracts to a widespread and legitimate desire for a more transparent, flexible, and personal system and renders equilibruim to the organizational overgrowth and mirky administrative mechanisms of the managed care period.

- However, consumer-driven health care suffers from its shortcomings. Blunt cost-sharing provisions, unadjusted for the patient’s income or health status, will impose a penalty the poor/sick while permitting their wealthier and healthier citizens to keep higher balances in their health savings accounts.