HarrisInteractive
Health Care News
Editor: Humphrey Taylor, Chairman of The Harris Poll
June 22, 2004
Reputations of Pharmaceutical and Health Insurance Companies Continue Their Downward Slide
In this year’s survey, 44% of all adults think the pharmaceutical companies are doing a good job for their consumers (and 48% think they are doing a bad job). In 1997, fully 79% thought the industry was doing a good job.
Health insurance companies were never as popular, during the last seven years, as pharmaceutical companies, but in 1997 a 55% majority believed they were doing a good job for their consumers. …only 36% now give them good marks – 19 points lower than seven years ago.
Some members of the public see a difference between managed care and health insurance companies, even though virtually all insurance companies now sell managed care, and it really is just one industry. Only 30% of the public give managed care companies good marks… For the past two years, managed care has been tied for last place with the tobacco companies.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/newsletters/healthnews/HI_HealthCareNews2004Vol4_Iss11.pdf
Comment: In this survey of the public view of 15 industries, they were asked, “Do you think health insurance companies (or one of 14 other industries) generally do a good or bad job of serving their consumers?”
With pharmaceutical firms, other surveys have indicated that the public believes that drug prices in the U.S. are too high. We now need government intervention in drug pricing, through bulk purchasing and/or regulation, balancing value for purchasers with fair profits for the manufacturers.
The public clearly recognizes that the insurance plans are not serving us well. This is further reinforced by a plethora of studies confirming that private insurers provide essentially no value when judged by cost and quality. Administrative costs are outrageous. And, rather than pooling risk, they serve as wasteful middlemen for healthier individuals as they dump the more costly patients into taxpayer funded programs or, worse, out into the street. Destroying the fundamental functions of insurance certainly results in impaired quality of their insurance products. High costs with poor quality, by definition, destroys value. In contrast, administrative efficiency and a universal risk pool, features of a single payer system, would provide the value that we now need in health care coverage.
Since the public recognizes that private insurers are serving us poorly, why do they keep electing politicians that support policies that nurture this industry at a great cost to the rest of us?
The fact that we need change, isn’t that like a… well… Duh!