Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
December 2010
Cost-sharing: Effects on spending and outcomes
By Sarah Goodell, M.A. and Katherine Swartz, Ph.D., based on a research synthesis by Swartz
This brief examines how cost-sharing affects the use of services, whether some patients are more sensitive to cost-sharing than others, and whether reduced use of services as a result of cost-sharing has an effect on health outcomes. All of these issues factor into whether and how cost-sharing could be used to reduce the rate of growth of health care spending.
Policy Implications
Recent studies of patient cost-sharing confirm the primary conclusion of the HIE — demand for most health care services is price sensitive. When people have to pay more, they reduce their use of health care. The HIE’s exclusion of the elderly, the increase in the prevalence of chronic conditions, and changes to medical care and insurance design since the 1970s, however, make it important to re-examine the role of cost-sharing. Findings from more recent research highlight important implications for policy-makers, including:
* Patient cost-sharing is not necessarily an effective mechanism for significantly slowing health care spending. Most people are healthy and cost-sharing would only modestly affect their health care spending. People who are very sick or who have serious chronic health conditions are typically deferring to their physicians rather than making choices about medical care based on cost-sharing. Moreover, by itself, cost-sharing is highly unlikely to slow the growth in spending unless the expected increases in the costs of appropriate care for the very sick also slow.
* Cost-sharing is not well-targeted on low-value services. Patient cost-sharing generally has been organized in broad categories (e.g., outpatient care, inpatient care, emergency department care). These broad categorizations do not help people distinguish between essential and nonessential services. Comparative effectiveness research could help insurers and government programs better target cost-sharing to improve value.
* Caution should be used when increasing cost-sharing for low-income populations or the chronically ill. Not only are low-income populations disproportionately affected by increased cost-sharing, but they also are more price sensitive than other income groups. Unless the cost-sharing increases are concentrated on services that are ineffective or unnecessary, low-income groups may avoid necessary medical care as a result. Increased cost-sharing for people with chronic conditions may result in higher expenditures for hospitalizations and other adverse outcomes if necessary care is reduced.
Policy Brief:
http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/121710.policysynthesis.costsharing.brief.pdf
Full Research Synthesis Report by Katherine Swartz, Ph.D. (40 pages):
http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/121710.policysynthesis.costsharing.rpt.pdf
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
This is a very important report. Let me tell you why.
Conservatives have framed the problem of our very high health care costs as being due to a lack of sensitivity of health care prices by patient-consumers who are simply demanding too much care. This is been repeated so many times that moderates and liberals are now parroting the same message. They profess that patients must face large deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance if we are ever going to get our health care costs under control.
It is true that these forms of cost-sharing do reduce health care spending, but is the savings significant? And is there any downside, any unintended consequences, to applying these price sensitizers to health care shopping?
Too much care?
When is the last time that you went to your health care professional and demanded too much care? If it isn’t you who is guilty of this transgression, then who is? I didn’t see these people in my very busy practice. Sure, you can find a few anecdotes, but most people simply are not motivated to use their time and money to seek out care that they don’t need.
Reduction in spending
The healthier one-half of our population uses only three percent of health care. They may be price sensitive shoppers when they have significant cost-sharing, but even if they reduced spending by ten percent, the savings of three-tenths of one-percent would represent only a negligible decline in our national health expenditures.
Twenty percent of us use eighty percent of the nation’s health care. These are people with very significant problems who are preoccupied with accessing the health care that they need, and are no longer concerned about the deductibles that they’ve already gone through. Cost-sharing is not intended to apply to individuals with significant illnesses or injuries anyway. So cost-sharing has very little impact on eighty percent of our national health expenditures.
The remaining thirty percent of us use about sixteen percent of health care. Some of this is urgent care, over which we have little choice, so price shopping isn’t an issue. But suppose that we could actually reduce spending in this group by about ten percent; that would still be only about 1.6 percent of our national spending. Combined with the 0.3 percent above, that’s still under two percent.
If you read the report, you will find that it is common for people to make unwise decisions as to which care they decline because of the out-of-pocket costs involved. These studies show that the net costs are sometimes higher because forgoing treatment can result in a greater incidence of emergency department visits and hospitalizations, and can sometimes intensify their chronic problems, making them more expensive to manage. Much of the relatively paltry savings from creating price sensitivity is lost due to the offset of the higher costs of deferred medical management.
As this report states, “cost-sharing is highly unlikely to slow the growth in spending unless the expected increases in the costs of appropriate care for the very sick also slow.” We need to consider more effective options than cost-sharing if we want to tame health care costs.
Unintended consequences
Cost-sharing has been demonstrated to result in adverse outcomes in two particularly vulnerable groups: low-income individuals and families, and individuals with chronic disease.
Although Medicaid selectively covers the low-income sector with more generous benefits and usually without significant cost-sharing, as a chronically underfunded welfare program, access is often impaired because of a lack of willing providers. Also, as states struggle with their budgets, some are introducing more cost-sharing into their Medicaid programs in order to reduce spending.
For those with incomes just above the level at which they would qualify for Medicaid, the standard plan in the exchanges will have an actuarial value of only 70 percent, which can be achieved only by including cost-sharing in the plan design.
Creating financial barriers to care for this vulnerable sector clearly reduces their access to beneficial health care services – the opposite of what a well functioning health care system should be doing.
The same applies to the chronically ill. The health care financing system should be designed to help them get the care that they need. Cost-sharing does the opposite. Also it is in this sector that cost sharing has often been shown to result in the opposite of its intent. Instead of reducing health care spending, the financial barriers of cost sharing have often resulted
in higher costs because of more expensive emergency department and in-hospital care that must be rendered due to the financial barriers that result in inadequate chronic disease management.
Prevention of financial hardship
A prevalent concept is that the purpose of insurance is to protect against catastrophic loss, but individuals should be personally responsible for routine medical expenses. That has been repeated so often that it is widely accepted. Yet many studies have confirmed that so-called routine expenses can be very burdensome financially. When medical debt contributes to personal bankruptcy, the routine expenses of cost-sharing have defeated this purpose of preventing catastrophic loss since the necessity of filing bankruptcy is, in itself, catastrophic.
We need to abandon the glib definition of insurance as being only for the purpose of covering catastrophic loss, and replace it with the definition that a health care financing system is for the purpose of removing financial barriers to the care that a patient should have. Cost-sharing does the opposite by creating financial barriers that should be removed.
Solidarity
Another prevalent attitude is that the government should stay out of our lives, and we should each tend to our own needs. As an abstraction, that concept has a certain appeal, and, consequently, a wide following. But there are very few of us who are not offended when we hear real-life stories of people who suffer when they fail to receive the medical care that they should have. We are particularly offended when we hear that the individuals’ insurance failed them in their times of need.
Insurance should be designed to help people get the care they need. Yet, as we all know, it is frequently designed to reduce spending on health care for the business purposes of keeping insurance premiums competitive and enhancing profits. One of the most important tools used by the insurers is cost-sharing. At times it seems as if they are a business set up more for the purpose reducing health care spending than helping us get health care.
Traditional private insurance has represented a form of social solidarity in which we join together to pool our risks so that none of us would have to suffer financial hardship in the face of medical need. But the interests of private insurers are very different from the interests of patients. The tool of cost-sharing serves the interests of the private insurers very well, but it fractures the solidarity that was intended to bring those with needs the health care that they need.
Other nations have expressed solidarity in a more effective manner. The people join together, through their governments, to finance their universal pools to serve as a resource for funds to pay for health care that people need. Many of those nations have rejected the concept of cost-sharing because of its perversities. They provide first dollar coverage for health care.
Those nations that do eliminate the barriers of cost-sharing still provide comprehensive benefits for everyone at a cost much lower than what we spend here in the United States. That’s the kind of solidarity that we need and that we would have if people weren’t confused by prevailing misperceptions that our goal should be to stop people from demanding too much care, and that we can do that by assessing the penalties of cost-sharing on people who attempt to access the care that they need.
You should consider downloading the RWJF brief for future use. We need to change the national discourse from that of using the consumer-directed tools of cost-sharing – tools that save very little money and impair outcomes – that are being used to address the alleged but fictional excess patient demand for care. Instead we need to have a national dialogue on how we can improve access to the care that patients need, and do it in an affordable manner (i.e., single payer).