From a University of Michigan Health System news release:
ANN ARBOR, MI – As 2008 begins, millions of Americans
are having to dig deeper into their own pockets every time they refill
a prescription or see a doctor.
The reason? Higher co-payments that took effect January 1, as
employers try to deal with the rising cost of health insurance by
making employees and retirees pay more.
But a new study finds that instead of going up, co-pays should go down – at least for some people taking some drugs.
Just
by cutting a few dollars off the co-pay, the study suggests, employers
could increase the chances that employees with chronic illnesses will
take certain preventive medicines. And that could pay off in the long
run, in the form of fewer hospitalizations or emergency room visits for
employees with diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and other
conditions.
Specifically, the study showed that
a major private employer significantly increased the use of important
preventive medicines among its employees by automatically making some
medications free, and slashing co-pays for other drugs by 50 percent.
Meanwhile, another employer that kept its co-pays the same didn’t
experience the same increase in use of preventive medicines.
The
difference in medication use between chronically ill employees at the
two companies was sizable -- even though all the employees in the study
were also enrolled in special programs designed to help them take
control of their diseases.
The study is published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs by a team led by University of Michigan
and Harvard University researchers. It is the first rigorous,
controlled trial of a concept called “value based insurance design.”
That
concept, introduced in the late 1990s by members of the research team,
is based on the idea that there should be few barriers standing between
a chronically ill person and the medications that can keep them well
enough to work and to avoid health crises and complications related to
their disease. Even a barrier of a few dollars is enough to keep people
from using the medicines they need the most.
“All
research to this point has shown that individuals will not buy
important medical services even if there’s a small financial barrier:
$5 or even $2,” says senior author Mark Fendrick, M.D., of the
U-M Medical School and
School of Public Health.
“This study showed that when you remove those barriers, people started
using these high-value services significantly more. These results
bolster the idea that health insurance benefits should be designed in
ways that produce the most health per dollar spent.”
Posted on Tuesday, January 8, 2008
by Brad Neese
filed under