Healthcare Costs and the New Cost Conscious Patient

My favorite health economist, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, has put out a really interesting post on her Health Populi blog talking about what the SCOTUS ACA ruling means for health consumers (Side Note: Here’s the lesson I took from the ruling.). Jane offers an important perspective that we should think about as we look to the future of healthcare. Here’s an excerpt from her article:

There are still tweaks and adjustments to be made to the law, and market supports that must deal with the ever-rising price of health care. While optimists report health care cost increases moderated to 6.5% in 2015, this growth rate is nonetheless many times greater than peoples’ wage increases (relatively stagnant for a decade) and the Consumer Price Index which in the previous year was actually negative (due to lower costs of petrol and other decreasing costs in the household budget). The one cost households can count on going up, up, up is….healthcare.

And so with the growth of high-deductible health plans and health savings accounts, health consumers must become health care shoppers — that is, if people want to gain some control over their financial wellness.

What does this new cost conscious patient mean for healthcare? What systems are we going to need to be able to handle the patient? Will we be able to continue providing care to patients without any real idea on how much that care will cost? Or will we need systems that help us know what the cost of care will be so the patient can choose to buy that care or not? Will cost conscious patients want to be kept well instead of just having their current complaint treated?

There are these and a lot of other questions that are raised by this shift in patient consumption of healthcare services. Understanding these changes is going to be extremely important for healthcare organizations to survive.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • In most cases, the provider should assume responsibility in explaining to the patient all the costs of care that they are proposing and even going beyond that giving them options with various clinical effectiveness data as available to allow the patient consumer to make a truly informed decision.

  • Anshuman,
    They barely have time to discuss the recommended treatment and address the chief complaint. Thinking they have the time to explain the cost is a pipe dream in most situations. A few make the extra effort and for some things they do a good job, but in some cases the doctor doesn’t even know either.

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