Health Care Payment Reform

Lee Aase, the social media guru at Mayo Clinic, is presenting at the World Health Care Congress Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity.

Remember when the consumer-directed health plan was supposed to create a rational marketplace that would save America’s health care system?

The 2008 Consumer Engagement in Health Care Survey conducted by the Employee Benefits Research Institute found that 3 percent of the population was enrolled in a CDHP in 2008, up from 2 percent in 2007 and 1 percent in 2006.  Enrollment in high-deductible plans–that is, a plan with a high deductible where the individual is not enrolled in a health savings account or health reimbursement account–remained at 11 percent.

Together, enrollment in a CDHP or HDHP represents 6.6 percent of the market for adults between the ages of 21 and 64.

Does this suggest that the promise of CDHP is not going to be realized? Paul Fronstin, director of the Health Research and Education Program at EBRI, doesn’t see it that way.

The fact is, you’re looking at about, as of last year, 10 million adults in a market that didn’t exist 10 years ago. You throw in the children and easily you’re at 15 million. And the number has been growing, and I think it will continue to grow.

The expectation shouldn’t be that this is something we’d see happen overnight. The fact that we’ve gone from zero to 10 million -plus, when you throw in dependents – in such a short period of time–leads me to believe it’s too early to say that these things aren’t catching on.

Details of the consumer engagement survey can be found here.