By Michael K. Gusmano, Karen J. Maschke, and Mildred Z. Solomon
Health Affairs, March 2019
Abstract
There are numerous calls for building health care delivery systems that are more patient centered. The focus on patient-centered care has increasingly begun to rely upon, and even merge with, the concept of patients as consumers. Early references to patients as consumers were made by patient advocates who were attempting to challenge professional and corporate dominance in health care. Today, āconsumer-drivenā health care has become associated with neoliberal efforts to emphasize market factors in health reform and deemphasize government regulation and financing. In our view, a narrow focus on consumerism is conceptually confused and potentially harmful. The consumer metaphor wrongly assumes that health care is a market in the usual understanding of that term, that the high cost of US health care is a function of excessive consumer demand, and that price transparency and competition can deliver on the promise of reducing costs or ensuring quality. Furthermore, a consumer metaphor places disproportionate burdens on patients to reduce health care costs, and it could erode professional obligations to provide appropriate and effective care.
Introduction
Building a health care delivery system that is more patient centered has a lengthy history, including powerful grassroots efforts beginning in the 1960s. These initiatives see patient-centered care as an important means of improving health outcomes and a morally worthy good in itself. As a means to an end, patient-centered care includes efforts to make the care delivery system more efficient and easier for patients to navigate. Patient engagementāa particular form of patient-centered careāyields better, well-documented outcomes by stimulating patients to take on more active roles in promoting and maintaining their health. As a moral end in itself, patient-centered care emphasizes the importance of honoring patientsā values and preferences, and it is less paternalistic and more respectful. Although there are concerns about how the concept might be misapplied, there is broad support for it, evidenced by federal investment in studying how best to ensure patient-centered outcomes and patient-centered outcomes research.
Increasingly, however, the focus on patient-centered care has begun to rely upon, and even merge with, the concept of patients as consumers. In this article we call for greater vigilance in distinguishing patient-centered care from the concept of consumer-driven health care. Too often consumer-driven health care is used as if it were a synonym for patient-centered care. We argue that consumer-driven care is based on critical myths about what creates, and what can rein in, high-cost care. Moreover, the consumer-driven concept can easily place the burden for systemwide cost containment on the shoulders of individual patients. In this article we offer a brief history of the patient-centered care movement, demonstrate how the language of patient-centeredness is becoming appropriated by those advocating market reforms, and then articulate why the consumer metaphor is misguided and potentially harmful.
Origins of the Patient-Centered Care Movement
In contrast to the early use of these terms to connote ways of empowering patients, consumer driven and consumerism are now associated with market-oriented health reforms that place a burden on patients to solve cost and quality problems. These consumer terms function as metaphors that represent conceptual confusion and are potentially harmful. The terms wrongly assume that health care is a competitive market and that the high cost of US health care is a function of excessive consumer demand. Because these requisite assumptions are not met, the metaphorās remedyāprice transparency and competitionācannot deliver on the promise of reducing costs or ensuring quality. Moreover, it is misleading to use consumer driven, defined in this narrow sense, as a synonym for patient centered. A consumer metaphor could also erode obligations by policy makers and health care systems to build a truly patient-centered care system.
Health Care Is Not a Market
Patients can be construed as consumers only if they are operating within a market. But health care is not a market in the usual way that markets are defined, and thus patients do not have the power that consumers have to shape that market. Patients are not as well informed as physicians are about medical care. Often patients do not have well-formed preferences, and they seek care under circumstances in which they do not have the time or emotional stamina to shop around on the basis of quality and price. And if policy makers treat health care like any other market, there will likely be very limited cost savings, if any, and huge inequities will continue and likely increase. As Nancy Tomes puts it, āthis linguistic transformation has come to represent the worst consequences of American medicineās growing market orientation.
The High Cost of US Health Care Is Not Due To Excessive Consumer Demand
Policy makers in the US frequently act as if the main problem is excess volume, which in turn arises from excess patient demand. Because most patients in the US have some form of health insurance, they are insulated from the full cost of health care. Some commentators are concerned that there is a potential moral hazard, because insurance provides patients with an incentive to consume health care beyond the point at which marginal benefit equals marginal cost.
More than just a technical term, moral hazard is a concept that is normatively loaded. It suggests that health care spending is the result of policies that offer an incentive for bad behavior.
Moral hazard concerns suggest that the use of expensive hospitalizations, surgeries, and other interventions are shaped primarily by ability to pay. This perspective fails to recognize that most people consume such services only reluctantly. The use of these services is often driven by providers, not by patients. Indeed, academics and policy makers have expressed concern for decades about the reliance of the health insurance system on fee-for-service payments to physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers. Fee-for-service provides an incentive for physicians to deliver additional and more complex services than patients need (or more care than economists would view as efficient) because health care providers receive an additional payment for every additional serviceāand services that are viewed as more technically complex generate higher fees. In most countries outside the US, however, āprovider-drivenā demand is not countered by shifting costs to individual patients and asking them to control costs by acting as informed consumers in a marketplace. Instead, most countries rely on a combination of overall budget targets for health care services and systems of all-payer rate regulation in which national health insurance funds negotiate rates for hospital, physician, and other services with representatives from those professions. Because the US does not use the negotiating power of government to confront the power of providers, it pays higher prices for all medical goods and services than other countries do.
Not only is the use of market competition limited when it comes to asking patients to make efficient decisions about health care services and providers, but it also does not work well when it comes to making decisions about health insurance plans. Competition among health plans in the Medicare program was promoted as a method for reducing the costs of the program, but Medicare Advantage has not produced the intended savings. In fact, there has been some examination of choices made in Medicare Part D, suggesting that consumers do not necessarily make choices in their own best interests: Beneficiaries fail to select plans that provide better risk protection at lower cost. These findings are consistent with earlier work on choice overload and Medicare beneficiariesā selection of health plans. The findings led economist Paul Krugman to exclaim that āāconsumer-basedā medicine has been a bust everywhere it has been tried.
While it is wise to help patients make more informed decisions about the costs of care and to grow in their ability to make quality comparisons across health systems, the main driver of health care costs is not consumer demand, but rather the introduction of new technologies and unwillingness on the part of US political leaders to regulate pricesāor at least use government bargaining power as leverage to negotiate lower prices. The US relies on a system of uncoordinated payment by thousands of payers, many of which do not have the bargaining power necessary to drive down prices. This has resulted in high prices for medical services. Technological improvements in health care have driven increases in cost all over the world, but extraordinarily high prices and a refusal by government to regulate them or bargain them lower differentiate the US from other countries.
The Consumer Metaphor Could Erode Health Care Professionalism
Medical professionalism requires independent, discretionary judgment. Professionals do not simply do as they are told or requested but must act on the basis of knowledge, skill, and fiduciary obligations to patientsā well-being.
Hospitals must judge each case to find the right balance between patient and family preference and physician integrity. It seems reasonable to anticipate that as the consumer metaphor grows, physiciansā authority in these kinds of cases could erode to the point where they may become technicians doing what they are asked to do, but doing so against their own consciences.
Professionalism may also erode if physicians are more inclined to offer unproven treatments simply because patients demand them. If the customer is always right, self-restraint on the part of providers could erode.
Conclusion
After four decades of organized patient advocacy, US patients are still struggling to influence the health care decisions and policies that shape their lives. Conflating consumer approaches with authentically patient-centered approaches will exacerbate this gap. In health care delivery and health policy, a patient-centered approach affirms the ethical principles of respect for persons and justice while striving to make the health system more responsive to patientsā values and preferences. There are some patient-centered approaches, such as patient engagement and activation, that yield substantial improvements in health outcomes. Pursuing the sensible goal of creating a patient-centered health system will be undermined if consumer metaphors prevail. It is important for policy makers and health system leaders to be vigilant in distinguishing between these seemingly similar, but different, approaches. Patient-centered approaches aim to ensure clinical care that can meet patientsā preferences and needs. That is different from a consumer orientation calling on patients to be prudent purchasers of medical care services. The former approach empowers patients. The latter expects patients to solve societyās cost-containment challenges.
https://www.healthaffairs.org…
Comment:
By Don McCanne, M.D.
The authors are from the Hastings Center, a nonprofit bioethics research institute in New York. That is important to understand since the consumer-driven movement in health care has left out this one crucial element: ethics.
Advocates of consumer-driven health care have conflated the primacy of the patient with the patient-as-a-consumer metaphor, but the two have very little in common.
A discussion of this issue is very timely since legislation to enact a single payer Medicare for All program has been introduced in Congress. Elimination of financial barriers to care (deductibles and other cost sharing) is a fundamental feature of this model of reform. Consumer-driven models deliberately erect financial barriers to care in order to deter the use of health care services and thus reduce health care spending, but it does so at the cost of impairing access to beneficial health care services and potentially exposing patients to financial hardship. In sharp contrast, a well designed single payer model uses much more patient-friendly methods of controlling spending. Specifically, costs are contained through publicly-administered negotiated pricing and global budgeting. Pricing is high enough to ensure adequate capacity in the system yet not excessive, thereby ensuring that health care will be available and affordable for society as a whole.
As the authors conclude, we should not expect patients to solve societyās cost-containment challenges. “Pursuing the sensible goal of creating a patient-centered health system will be undermined if consumer metaphors prevail.” Thus it is an ethical imperative to reject consumer-driven health care and move forward with an equitable, affordable system that ensures essential health care for everyone – Single Payer Medicare for All.
Stay informed! Visit www.pnhp.org/qotd to sign up for daily email updates.