What Do People Think About When Choosing Health Insurance Plans?
Here is a discussion I had with Tess Vigeland of Los Angeles Public Radio about the psychology of choosing health plans.
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In health policy circles (yes, those exist!), experts often refer to three aims for a modern healthcare system – to offer (1) universal access to (2) high quality medical care at (3) an affordable cost. Access, quality, and cost: a possibly unachievable set of goals, certainly in the U.S., where the quality of our care…
Such a no-brainer: If patients who receive care at Hospital A are more likely to get readmitted to the hospital 10, 20 or 30 days after discharge than patients in Hospital B, then Hospital A must be doing something wrong. Perhaps clinicians at that hospital are less adept at diagnosing and managing patients’ problems. Perhaps…
I have been writing quite a bit about healthcare price transparency lately. And so have a lot of other people. Many of us have been pointing to insane variation in how much hospitals charge for their services. Walk across the street, and you might see the price of a routine healthcare service rise two or threefold. But…
For decades now, policymakers have been trying to slow down the growth of healthcare costs. For much of this time, a large part of that effort was directed at hospital spending. American hospitals are extremely expensive, and take care of patients with the most severe illnesses. So if we’re going to control costs, it seems…
Something like one in seven people living in the US have no healthcare insurance. In fact, the number of uninsured people has grown by 7 million since Trump has become president. (Make America Uninsured Again?) These numbers are atrocious. Embarrassing. Shameful, actually, in a country as wealthy as ours. We need to recommit ourselves to guaranteeing people access…
In 2010, the state of Rhode Island decided to tackle high healthcare costs. It did so by requiring insurers to meet affordability standards. The plan worked, but not for the reasons you probably suspect. Let’s start with what Rhode Island’s standards look like. It required several things of insurers: Premium caps – with annual inflation equal…