Consumer-driven health plans (CDHPS) have several advantages. They include: the plans help employers reduce their costs on healthcare for their employees even though it’s a relatively modest reduction and a small difference in expenses for employers (Evans, 2016). The plans also save money for mostly healthy employees, those who do not require much spending on premiums and rarely utilize care. It is advantageous as the employees can keep the money they spare from a lack of hospitalizations for their other uses. Thirdly, employees using the plans spend less on unnecessary care since they only seek care when necessary and often seek alternative treatment options or request generic versions instead of established brands (Haviland et al., 2016). Consumer-driven health plans affect how employees discern and decide on their health care choices.
Despite the merits, the plans also have disadvantages. First, CDHPS are a problem to workers. The most affected are employees not trained on the difference betwixt necessities and unnecessity care (Deak & Marlowe, 2017). Secondly, the plans make the seeking of care by employees arduous since they have to shop for the cheapest possible care that is time-consuming and psychologically draining.
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Consumer Driven Health Plans Being Here to Stay
I do not think consumer-driven care is here to stay. In my opinion, employers will start to engage employees on which plan they are comfortable with before deciding on which plan to adopt for the employees. Other employers might consider customizing plans with liaison with medical insurance firms to allow employers to use the best plans for them. However, other employers are likely to continue using the CDHPS due to the popularity it has among some employees to get affordable health benefits (Einav & Finkelstein, 2018). Employers and employees that do like the traditional health insurance options will likely stick with CDHPS, while others might prefer sticking with their traditional options.
References
Deak, E., & Marlowe, E. M. (2017). Right-Sizing Technology in the Era of Consumer-Driven Health Care. Clinical Microbiology Newsletter, 39(15) , 115-123.
Einav, L., & Finkelstein, A. (2018). Moral hazard in health insurance: What we know and how we know it. Journal of the European Economic Association, 16(4) , 957-982.
Evans, B. J. (2016). Barbarians at the gate: consumer-driven health data commons and the transformation of citizen science. American journal of law & medicine, 42(4) , 651-685.
Haviland, A. M., Eisenberg, M. D., Mehrotra, A., Huckfeldt, P. J., & Sood, N. (2016). "Do “Consumer-Directed” health plans bend the cost curve over time?.". Journal of health economics 46 (2016): , 33-51.
