By Mark Pauly
National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2012

Abstract
 
The conventional model for the use of cost effectiveness analysis for health programs involves determining whether the cost per unit of effectiveness of the program is better than some socially determined maximum acceptable cost per unit of effectiveness. If a program is better, the policy implication is that it should be implemented by full coverage of its cost by insurance; if not, no coverage should be provided and the program should not be implemented.  This paper examines the unanswered question of how cost effectiveness analysis should be performed and interpreted when insurance coverage can involve non-negligible cost sharing.  It explores both the question of how cost effectiveness is affected by the presence of cost sharing, and the more fundamental question of cost effectiveness when cost sharing is itself set at the cost effective level.  Both a benchmark model where only “societal” preferences (embodied in a threshold value of dollars per unit of health) matter and a model where individual willingness to pay can be combined with societal values are considered. A common view that cost sharing should vary inversely with program cost effectiveness is shown to be incorrect. A key issue in correct analysis is whether there is heterogeneity either in marginal effectiveness of care or marginal values of care that cannot be perceived by the social planner but is known by the demander. The cost effectiveness of a program is shown to depend upon the level of cost sharing; it is possible that some programs that would fail the social test at both zero coverage and full coverage will be acceptable with positive cost sharing.  Combining individual and social preferences affects both the choice of programs and the extent of cost sharing.

From the Introduction

Of course, the answer to the question of the relationship between cost effectiveness values and cost sharing depends both on the perspective taken and the empirical facts.  So I first outline the simple and correct application of a decision rule to treatment choices based on cost effectiveness in the “binary coverage” setting, when insurance either covers 100 percent of the cost of a given type of care or leaves it entirely uncovered,  and the extra welfarist approach is taken.  I show that this approach usually is based on two assumptions: a single value for expected improvement in health outcomes is to be applied to all patients, and a single monetary value for those expected marginal benefits prevails.  This is the approach, avowedly “extra-welfarist,” much favored at present in the United Kingdom by the NICE advisory body.

However, I then show that opening the door to consideration of cost sharing means that many things, including this perspective, might appropriately be modified.  Modifications are needed if there is heterogeneity in either effectiveness of the treatment across patients or in the values citizens place on health outcomes, and that heterogeneity is determined to be relevant to policy.  I show that the ideal level of “interior” cost sharing depends on whether consumer values are assumed to be relevant, on how much consumer values really vary, and most especially on whether the extent of variation in expected effectiveness across patients is perceived by patients but cannot be known by the insurer.  I briefly consider as well the possibility that social values are variable or uncertain.

Conclusion
 
These are somewhat discouraging conclusions.  They definitely imply that there is no simple but correct way to move from findings of a typical cost effectiveness study to saying what the coinsurance rate should be for a non-poor population.  The most one could hope for would be a binary decision of whether or not a particular treatment should or should not be covered by insurance with a particular predetermined cost sharing rate (usually but not necessarily zero).  They also imply that the cost effectiveness of a treatment cannot be properly determined unless coinsurance is set at the optimal level.  So, unless there is perfect information to identify heterogeneity of benefits, considerations of consumer demand (in the classic economic sense of the shape of the demand curve) need to be added, regardless of the normative model.

The fundamental problem is the assumption of a uniform benefit of uniform value which is central to the societal cost effectiveness model.  This assumption is presumably made for administrative and expository reasons, not because anyone believes that marginal health benefits are uniform, or that the marginal value of a health benefit (to a consumer or society) is independent of the current level of health or allocation of resources.  It was hard enough to get policymakers to accept the need for considering costs and the need to establish a money value for health outcomes, however arbitrary, and in the United States neither of these concepts is as yet effective.  But paradoxically it might be more feasible to get political acceptance if more attention to reasonable variation in effectiveness and value were explicit rather than suppressed in the analysis.  As always, there is a case to prefer approximating the perfect rather than precisely hitting the imperfect as a method of policy analysis.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18481

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Mark Pauly has contributed extensively to the policy literature on the moral hazard of health insurance (the hazard that individuals will obtain care that they do not need if they do not have to pay for it), a concept which has been used to support cost sharing (deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance) as a means to create consumer price sensitivity. Pauly now expands on the concept by applying it to cost effectiveness analysis.

With our very high health care costs, it is inevitable that more attention will be paid to cost effectiveness. Although most cost effectiveness analyses are aimed at whether or not a particular health care service or product provides adequate societal value (measured benefit per unit cost, especially costs that society pays through public programs or private insurance), Pauly now suggests that the value to the individual, as expressed by the level of cost sharing tolerated, should also be introduced in determining cost effectiveness.

First, a few words about cost effectiveness. Most health care professionals do attempt to provide cost effective care. If a very expensive procedure likely would provide no health care value, the practitioner would advise against its use. Likewise, low cost but high volume interventions that are eventually shown to be ineffective also would be abandoned by the practitioner.

Sometimes we simply don’t know whether the benefit is worth the cost. This is where cost effectiveness analysis can be helpful. If a cancer drug regimen that costs $300,000 results in maybe three months of poorer quality life due to side effects, but prolongs life by only three days, most reasonable individuals would decide that this is not cost effective and should not be paid for through our collective funds, whether government taxes or private insurance funds. Three months of hospice is better than three months and three days of therapeutic misery.

An example of a low cost, high volume intervention might be the use of an anti-hypertensive drug that in long term studies showed absolutely no benefit in reducing morbidity or mortality. Obviously that would not be cost effective, and its use would be abandoned.

Okay. So we determine that most medical interventions fall somewhere
between 100 percent cost effective and not cost effective at all. Then we are supposed to determine a level of cost sharing for each intervention that would motivate the patient to make a correct decision on whether or not to accept the care based on consumer-directed cost effectiveness decisions that still provide adequate societal value? Come on!

Forget moral hazard. Through cost effectiveness analyses we can determine whether or not medical interventions should be available to patients, and we don’t need to have patients making spending decisions to determine health care value. Even if the benefit may not be uniform between patients, the decisions should be made at the clinical level based strictly on medical benefit and not on cost. Cost decisions should be made at the societal level.

The purpose of cost sharing is to reduce health care spending. Our message earlier this week demonstrated that controlling moral hazard through cost sharing introduces behavioral hazard; that is, decisions that patents make when exposed to out-of-pocket costs as a consequence of accessing health care can be detrimental. Policies that promote detrimental medical decisions are bad policies.

Keep in mind that we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as the United Kingdom, yet we have ever-increasing cost sharing whereas their system pays 100 percent of the cost of covered services. There are many features of their national health services that result in lower costs, but one that applies to today’s discussion is their application of cost effectiveness and evidence-based analyses through their National Institute for Health and Clinical Effectiveness (NICE). Eliminating ineffective and detrimental care reduces costs, with a net gain in quality.

Just think of what we could have if we established a single payer financing system. We could reduce administrative and clinical waste while eliminating financial barriers to care so that everyone would have access to cost effective and evidence-based, high quality care – care that is really NICE.

Cost Effectiveness Analysis and the Design of Cost-Sharing in Insurance: Solving a Puzzle

By Mark Pauly
National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2012
Abstract
The conventional model for the use of cost effectiveness analysis for health programs involves determining whether the cost per unit of effectiveness of the program is better than some socially determined maximum acceptable cost per unit of effectiveness. If a program is better, the policy implication is that it should be implemented by full coverage of its cost by insurance; if not, no coverage should be provided and the program should not be implemented.  This paper examines the unanswered question of how cost effectiveness analysis should be performed and interpreted when insurance coverage can involve non-negligible cost sharing.  It explores both the question of how cost effectiveness is affected by the presence of cost sharing, and the more fundamental question of cost effectiveness when cost sharing is itself set at the cost effective level.  Both a benchmark model where only “societal” preferences (embodied in a threshold value of dollars per unit of health) matter and a model where individual willingness to pay can be combined with societal values are considered. A common view that cost sharing should vary inversely with program cost effectiveness is shown to be incorrect. A key issue in correct analysis is whether there is heterogeneity either in marginal effectiveness of care or marginal values of care that cannot be perceived by the social planner but is known by the demander. The cost effectiveness of a program is shown to depend upon the level of cost sharing; it is possible that some programs that would fail the social test at both zero coverage and full coverage will be acceptable with positive cost sharing.  Combining individual and social preferences affects both the choice of programs and the extent of cost sharing.
From the Introduction
Of course, the answer to the question of the relationship between cost effectiveness values and cost sharing depends both on the perspective taken and the empirical facts.  So I first outline the simple and correct application of a decision rule to treatment choices based on cost effectiveness in the “binary coverage” setting, when insurance either covers 100 percent of the cost of a given type of care or leaves it entirely uncovered,  and the extra welfarist approach is taken.  I show that this approach usually is based on two assumptions: a single value for expected improvement in health outcomes is to be applied to all patients, and a single monetary value for those expected marginal benefits prevails.  This is the approach, avowedly “extra-welfarist,” much favored at present in the United Kingdom by the NICE advisory body.
However, I then show that opening the door to consideration of cost sharing means that many things, including this perspective, might appropriately be modified.  Modifications are needed if there is heterogeneity in either effectiveness of the treatment across patients or in the values citizens place on health outcomes, and that heterogeneity is determined to be relevant to policy.  I show that the ideal level of “interior” cost sharing depends on whether consumer values are assumed to be relevant, on how much consumer values really vary, and most especially on whether the extent of variation in expected effectiveness across patients is perceived by patients but cannot be known by the insurer.  I briefly consider as well the possibility that social values are variable or uncertain.
Conclusion
These are somewhat discouraging conclusions.  They definitely imply that there is no simple but correct way to move from findings of a typical cost effectiveness study to saying what the coinsurance rate should be for a non-poor population.  The most one could hope for would be a binary decision of whether or not a particular treatment should or should not be covered by insurance with a particular predetermined cost sharing rate (usually but not necessarily zero).  They also imply that the cost effectiveness of a treatment cannot be properly determined unless coinsurance is set at the optimal level.  So, unless there is perfect information to identify heterogeneity of benefits, considerations of consumer demand (in the classic economic sense of the shape of the demand curve) need to be added, regardless of the normative model.
The fundamental problem is the assumption of a uniform benefit of uniform value which is central to the societal cost effectiveness model.  This assumption is presumably made for administrative and expository reasons, not because anyone believes that marginal health benefits are uniform, or that the marginal value of a health benefit (to a consumer or society) is independent of the current level of health or allocation of resources.  It was hard enough to get policymakers to accept the need for considering costs and the need to establish a money value for health outcomes, however arbitrary, and in the United States neither of these concepts is as yet effective.  But paradoxically it might be more feasible to get political acceptance if more attention to reasonable variation in effectiveness and value were explicit rather than suppressed in the analysis.  As always, there is a case to prefer approximating the perfect rather than precisely hitting the imperfect as a method of policy analysis.
http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18481

Mark Pauly has contributed extensively to the policy literature on the moral hazard of health insurance (the hazard that individuals will obtain care that they do not need if they do not have to pay for it), a concept which has been used to support cost sharing (deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance) as a means to create consumer price sensitivity. Pauly now expands on the concept by applying it to cost effectiveness analysis.
With our very high health care costs, it is inevitable that more attention will be paid to cost effectiveness. Although most cost effectiveness analyses are aimed at whether or not a particular health care service or product provides adequate societal value (measured benefit per unit cost, especially costs that society pays through public programs or private insurance), Pauly now suggests that the value to the individual, as expressed by the level of cost sharing tolerated, should also be introduced in determining cost effectiveness.
First, a few words about cost effectiveness. Most health care professionals do attempt to provide cost effective care. If a very expensive procedure likely would provide no health care value, the practitioner would advise against its use. Likewise, low cost but high volume interventions that are eventually shown to be ineffective also would be abandoned by the practitioner.
Sometimes we simply don’t know whether the benefit is worth the cost. This is where cost effectiveness analysis can be helpful. If a cancer drug regimen that costs $300,000 results in maybe three months of poorer quality life due to side effects, but prolongs life by only three days, most reasonable individuals would decide that this is not cost effective and should not be paid for through our collective funds, whether government taxes or private insurance funds. Three months of hospice is better than three months and three days of therapeutic misery.
An example of a low cost, high volume intervention might be the use of an anti-hypertensive drug that in long term studies showed absolutely no benefit in reducing morbidity or mortality. Obviously that would not be cost effective, and its use would be abandoned.
Okay. So we determine that most medical interventions fall somewhere between 100 percent cost effective and not cost effective at all. Then we are supposed to determine a level of cost sharing for each intervention that would motivate the patient to make a correct decision on whether or not to accept the care based on consumer-directed cost effectiveness decisions that still provide adequate societal value? Come on!
Forget moral hazard. Through cost effectiveness analyses we can determine whether or not medical interventions should be available to patients, and we don’t need to have patients making spending decisions to determine health care value. Even if the benefit may not be uniform between patients, the decisions should be made at the clinical level based strictly on medical benefit and not on cost. Cost decisions should be made at the societal level.
The purpose of cost sharing is to reduce health care spending. Our message earlier this week demonstrated that controlling moral hazard through cost sharing introduces behavioral hazard; that is, decisions that patents make when exposed to out-of-pocket costs as a consequence of accessing health care can be detrimental. Policies that promote detrimental medical decisions are bad policies.
Keep in mind that we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as the United Kingdom, yet we have ever-increasing cost sharing whereas their system pays 100 percent of the cost of covered services. There are many features of their national health services that result in lower costs, but one that applies to today’s discussion is their application of cost effectiveness and evidence-based analyses through their National Institute for Health and Clinical Effectiveness (NICE). Eliminating ineffective and detrimental care reduces costs, with a net gain in quality.
Just think of what we could have if we established a single payer financing system. We could reduce administrative and clinical waste while eliminating financial barriers to care so that everyone would have access to cost effective and evidence-based, high quality care – care that is really NICE.

By Nick Zieminski
Reuters, October 22, 2012

U.S. corporate executives are more worried about providing healthcare benefits to their employees than about issues like wages, taxes or attracting qualified workers, according to a survey by the world’s No. 1 staffing company, Adecco SA.

In Adecco’s poll of senior executives, 55 percent named healthcare benefits as their biggest current business challenge, and about a third say they are holding back hiring because of healthcare reforms introduced by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Healthcare’s prominence as an issue has risen since the 2008-2009 recession, Adecco found: in 2007, only 35 percent called healthcare their top worry.

Obama’s 2010 healthcare law, upheld this year by the U.S. Supreme Court, is expected to raise insurance costs for employers because it calls for wider coverage of more people, including those with pre-existing medical conditions.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/us-adecco-election-survey-idUSBRE89L12T20121022

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to not disturb the largest sector of health insurance coverage already in existence: employer-sponsored health plans. Although costs were said to be almost intolerable for many employers, ACA included provisions to improve private health plans which will further increase costs for employers. Thus it is no surprise that health care has moved up on the executives’ list of concerns as their biggest business challenge.

Before the Democrats settled on the ACA model of reform, employers were looking for better ways of controlling costs. One of the models under consideration was single payer, an attractive option because of its greater efficiencies and assured coverage of everyone.

Business executives might have been more interested in the single payer model except for two perceived drawbacks: 1) They were not assured that they wouldn’t have to foot much of the bill for a national health program through higher payroll taxes, higher taxes on executive compensation, and higher corporate taxes, and 2) Many of them are ideologically conservative and did not want to see a government-run health care financing system.

With the passage of ACA health care moved from a top concern of 35 percent of the executives to a top concern of 55 percent of them. That suggests that they may believe they made a bad decision in passively allowing ACA to move forward, though there was token opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.

Another change taking place is that businesses are relying more on Medicare for their retirees as they pare back their health benefit programs for former employees. Obviously they recognize that Medicare provides a greater value for them than did their private programs, especially because of the federal funding of Medicare. It would not be much of a reach for them to decide that Medicare would also provide a greater value for them if it became the health benefit program for their active employees.

If we were to move forward with an improved Medicare that covered everyone, then the employers would need to be convinced that the taxes to fund the universal risk pool would be equitably distributed, and that they would not have to bear an unfair excessive financial burden for the program. Without getting into details on tax policy, suffice it to say that such a goal is readily achievable.

That would leave only ideology as a hurdle. Successful businessmen certainly place great importance on value. When it is demonstrated to them that an improved Medicare for all would control their health care costs well into the indefinite future, they would be very foolish to reject such a good deal. They really wouldn’t have to give up their ideology. They could take it to the smoking lounge and vent with their business colleagues, over a cigar and a snifter of brandy, how terrible it is that they had to accept the terms of a single payer system, but, after all, business is business.

Healthcare costs top U.S. executives’ concerns: Adecco survey

By Nick Zieminski
Reuters, October 22, 2012
U.S. corporate executives are more worried about providing healthcare benefits to their employees than about issues like wages, taxes or attracting qualified workers, according to a survey by the world’s No. 1 staffing company, Adecco SA.
In Adecco’s poll of senior executives, 55 percent named healthcare benefits as their biggest current business challenge, and about a third say they are holding back hiring because of healthcare reforms introduced by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Healthcare’s prominence as an issue has risen since the 2008-2009 recession, Adecco found: in 2007, only 35 percent called healthcare their top worry.
Obama’s 2010 healthcare law, upheld this year by the U.S. Supreme Court, is expected to raise insurance costs for employers because it calls for wider coverage of more people, including those with pre-existing medical conditions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/22/us-adecco-election-survey-idUS…

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to not disturb the largest sector of health insurance coverage already in existence: employer-sponsored health plans. Although costs were said to be almost intolerable for many employers, ACA included provisions to improve private health plans which will further increase costs for employers. Thus it is no surprise that health care has moved up on the executives’ list of concerns as their biggest business challenge.
Before the Democrats settled on the ACA model of reform, employers were looking for better ways of controlling costs. One of the models under consideration was single payer, an attractive option because of its greater efficiencies and assured coverage of everyone.
Business executives might have been more interested in the single payer model except for two perceived drawbacks: 1) They were not assured that they wouldn’t have to foot much of the bill for a national health program through higher payroll taxes, higher taxes on executive compensation, and higher corporate taxes, and 2) Many of them are ideologically conservative and did not want to see a government-run health care financing system.
With the passage of ACA health care moved from a top concern of 35 percent of the executives to a top concern of 55 percent of them. That suggests that they may believe they made a bad decision in passively allowing ACA to move forward, though there was token opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.
Another change taking place is that businesses are relying more on Medicare for their retirees as they pare back their health benefit programs for former employees. Obviously they recognize that Medicare provides a greater value for them than did their private programs, especially because of the federal funding of Medicare. It would not be much of a reach for them to decide that Medicare would also provide a greater value for them if it became the health benefit program for their active employees.
If we were to move forward with an improved Medicare that covered everyone, then the employers would need to be convinced that the taxes to fund the universal risk pool would be equitably distributed, and that they would not have to bear an unfair excessive financial burden for the program. Without getting into details on tax policy, suffice it to say that such a goal is readily achievable.
That would leave only ideology as a hurdle. Successful businessmen certainly place great importance on value. When it is demonstrated to them that an improved Medicare for all would control their health care costs well into the indefinite future, they would be very foolish to reject such a good deal. They really wouldn’t have to give up their ideology. They could take it to the smoking lounge and vent with their business colleagues, over a cigar and a snifter of brandy, how terrible it is that they had to accept the terms of a single payer system, but, after all, business is business.

By Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
Working Paper 18468
National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2012

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a model of health insurance that incorporates behavioral biases. In the traditional model, people who are insured overuse low value medical care because of moral hazard. There is ample evidence, though, of a different inefficiency: people underuse high value medical care because they make mistakes. Such “behavioral hazard” changes the fundamental tradeoff between insurance and incentives. With only moral hazard, raising copays increases the efficiency of demand by ameliorating overuse. With the addition of behavioral hazard, raising copays may reduce efficiency by exaggerating underuse. This means that estimating the demand response is no longer enough for setting optimal copays; the health response needs to be considered as well. This provides a theoretical foundation for value-based insurance design: for some high value treatments, for example, copays should be zero (or even negative). Empirically, this reinterpretation of demand proves important, since high value care is often as elastic as low value care. For example, calibration using data from a field experiment suggests that omitting behavioral hazard leads to welfare estimates that can be both wrong in sign and off by an order of magnitude. Optimally designed insurance can thus increase health care efficiency as well as provide financial protection, suggesting the potential for market failure when private insurers are not fully incentivized to counteract behavioral biases.

****

6.3 Evidence on Private Plans

These results suggest that competitive forces do not lead to efficient equilibrium insurance contracts when insurees are naive about their biases, but that the insurer will have an incentive to counteract biases when this saves the insurer money. These results may shed light on why more health insurance plans do not incorporate behavioral hazard into their copayment structures. Recall the evidence from Table 2 (from full paper at link below), which summarizes the features of several major insurance plans. Co-payments are rarely a function of the health benefit associated with the care for a particular patient.

Nevertheless, insurers could increase profits by promoting adherence to medications and treatments that save money over a reasonably short horizon (relative to the typical tenure of their enrollees), and the model suggests that insurers will invest in encouraging care in such instances.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18468.pdf

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD

Moral hazard in health insurance is said to occur when patients obtain unnecessary care merely because they don’t have to pay for it. Requiring patients to pay for at least a portion of their care, through deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance, supposedly disincentivizes patients from obtaining such unnecessary care, but does so at the cost of patients declining care that is quite appropriate and should be obtained. This paper attempts to compensate for that by adding behavioral hazard to that of moral hazard when determining when and how much financial exposure patients should have when accessing care. If the behavior of patients might cause them to underuse care, then cost sharing should be adjusted downward accordingly.

That’s the theory. In practice it would greatly add to the administrative burden of private health care financing to try to identify not only each instance when a patient might be inclined to overuse care unnecessarily (moral hazard), but also each instance in which a patient might avoid beneficial care because of cost barriers (behavioral hazard), and then to modify the patient’s share of each cost entailed based on these economic hazards.

Current estimates on how much could be saved by avoiding moral hazard are flawed anyway, primarily because they ignore the deleterious effect of behavioral hazard. Yet private insurance products incorporate cost sharing that does ignore behavioral hazard, except in very limited instances such as preventive services or cost sharing for important maintenance drugs. Once you make the adjustments in cost sharing that would prevent most or all behavioral hazard, the savings would dramatically diminish and might even be totally offset by the costs of the administrative excesses.

The most effective way to prevent behavioral hazard is to remove all financial barriers to care. The moral hazard remaining does not even apply to the eighty percent of health care that is consumed by patients with greater needs who have long exceeded their deductibles and stop loss. It’s simply not worth applying cost sharing measures to the remaining twenty percent of care for those of us who are relatively healthy, when the resulting decrease in our total national health expenditures would be almost negligible.

Besides, who are all of these people who are demanding care that they simply do not need? Thinking back through my decades of family practice, no one individual comes to mind.

By Katherine Baicker, Sendhil Mullainathan and Joshua Schwartzstein
Working Paper 18468
National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2012
ABSTRACT
This paper develops a model of health insurance that incorporates behavioral biases. In the traditional model, people who are insured overuse low value medical care because of moral hazard. There is ample evidence, though, of a different inefficiency: people underuse high value medical care because they make mistakes. Such “behavioral hazard” changes the fundamental tradeoff between insurance and incentives. With only moral hazard, raising copays increases the efficiency of demand by ameliorating overuse. With the addition of behavioral hazard, raising copays may reduce efficiency by exaggerating underuse. This means that estimating the demand response is no longer enough for setting optimal copays; the health response needs to be considered as well. This provides a theoretical foundation for value-based insurance design: for some high value treatments, for example, copays should be zero (or even negative). Empirically, this reinterpretation of demand proves important, since high value care is often as elastic as low value care. For example, calibration using data from a field experiment suggests that omitting behavioral hazard leads to welfare estimates that can be both wrong in sign and off by an order of magnitude. Optimally designed insurance can thus increase health care efficiency as well as provide financial protection, suggesting the potential for market failure when private insurers are not fully incentivized to counteract behavioral biases.
****
6.3 Evidence on Private Plans
These results suggest that competitive forces do not lead to efficient equilibrium insurance contracts when insurees are naive about their biases, but that the insurer will have an incentive to counteract biases when this saves the insurer money. These results may shed light on why more health insurance plans do not incorporate behavioral hazard into their copayment structures. Recall the evidence from Table 2 (from full paper at link below), which summarizes the features of several major insurance plans. Co-payments are rarely a function of the health benefit associated with the care for a particular patient.
Nevertheless, insurers could increase profits by promoting adherence to medications and treatments that save money over a reasonably short horizon (relative to the typical tenure of their enrollees), and the model suggests that insurers will invest in encouraging care in such instances.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18468.pdf

Moral hazard in health insurance is said to occur when patients obtain unnecessary care merely because they don’t have to pay for it. Requiring patients to pay for at least a portion of their care, through deductibles, co-payments and coinsurance, supposedly disincentivizes patients from obtaining such unnecessary care, but does so at the cost of patients declining care that is quite appropriate and should be obtained. This paper attempts to compensate for that by adding behavioral hazard to that of moral hazard when determining when and how much financial exposure patients should have when accessing care. If the behavior of patients might cause them to underuse care, then cost sharing should be adjusted downward accordingly.
That’s the theory. In practice it would greatly add to the administrative burden of private health care financing to try to identify not only each instance when a patient might be inclined to overuse care unnecessarily (moral hazard), but also each instance in which a patient might avoid beneficial care because of cost barriers (behavioral hazard), and then to modify the patient’s share of each cost entailed based on these economic hazards.
Current estimates on how much could be saved by avoiding moral hazard are flawed anyway, primarily because they ignore the deleterious effect of behavioral hazard. Yet private insurance products incorporate cost sharing that does ignore behavioral hazard, except in very limited instances such as preventive services or cost sharing for important maintenance drugs. Once you make the adjustments in cost sharing that would prevent most or all behavioral hazard, the savings would dramatically diminish and might even be totally offset by the costs of the administrative excesses.
The most effective way to prevent behavioral hazard is to remove all financial barriers to care. The moral hazard remaining does not even apply to the eighty percent of health care that is consumed by patients with greater needs who have long exceeded their deductibles and stop loss. It’s simply not worth applying cost sharing measures to the remaining twenty percent of care for those of us who are relatively healthy, when the resulting decrease in our total national health expenditures would be almost negligible.
Besides, who are all of these people who are demanding care that they simply do not need? Thinking back through my decades of family practice, no one individual comes to mind.