TL: You can look at the website of the Massachusetts Connector and that will give you some ideas of the price variation between the bronze and the gold policies, for example. For example, a 56-year-old person in Cambridge, MA, could find a bronze policy for as cheap as $462 per month. That same person could buy the lowest-priced gold plan for $712. My guess is that the platinum policy, which will be available under the exchanges, will be very expensive relative to the bronze policy. A policy that gives you 90 percent coverage is close to good coverage. It’s my understanding that under the NHS you have 100 percent coverage for most things. People over age 60 get their drugs free. In our Medicare program, even with a drug benefit, seniors may pay very high co-payments and co-insurance for their medicines.
The rise of marketing in healthcare
TL: I was in Coventry a year ago and visited one of your privately financed hospitals, and saw how they compete in their area. Their marketing and PR people are beginning to develop the same methods for marketing as US hospitals. They compete for patients using all the tricks and techniques of advertising and marketing. It was a very large hospital, very modern, very much like some of ours. They use the press. Their communications folks brought out this whole book of press clippings. It was huge. They said they needed to get more patients who needed treatments with high reimbursements. That’s what American hospitals do.
CS: What sort of methods were they using? Were they marketing to consumers? I know a lot of special hospitals have teams to market to doctors.
TL: They were marketing to consumers and trying to use the press, the local health reporters in the area, just as hospitals do here. They bring reporters in so they’ll write stories about some new machine. And judging from the book of clippings, the press usually complies.
CS: That’s interesting because in England, that never used to exist. The idea was that you would be referred to your local hospital and that would be that. Now, with these elective procedures, people have a choice of any hospital, really. So the incentive does exist for the hospital to market. But it certainly hasn’t gone to the extent of having billboards by the side of the road and that kind of thing. If they did and I’m pretty sure—going back to that taxpayer thing—people would say ‘what on earth are you doing spending my tax dollars on a billboard like that?’
TL: We have a lot of billboards on the side of the road, and most Americans never question what they cost.
Related stories:
“Keeping an Eye on Patient Safety, Part III: What we can learn from the Brits”
Excellent conversation. I'm looking forward to Part 2.
#1 Posted by Tom Barry, CJR on Tue 9 Oct 2012 at 02:30 PM
TL: To come back to your point that the Act could become more popular as people see the benefits: Most Americans aren’t going to be affected by it. They will still maintain their employer-provided coverage, and that’s 150 to 160 million people. What those people are going to see is insurance with higher and higher deductibles and more cost sharing and higher premiums. They are going to find that they’re paying a lot more for less coverage. That has been happening aside from the Affordable Care Act.
Trudy, I disagree with you and agree with your British counterpart. Most Americans at some point, probably sooner than later, are going to benefit from the ACA reforms and in fact millions already have benefited. Almost everyone goes through a transition between jobs, and when they realize they have the security of not losing health insurance and they can get financial assistance if they need it to buy coverage, they'll understand and value the law. And if the state health insurance exchanges work as envisioned, everyone will quickly see that as a big improvement in buying insurance.
#2 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Tue 9 Oct 2012 at 03:28 PM
Harris, possibly the most inimical aspect of the ACA is the degree to which it encourages "I got mine" among people who might ordinarily be less scusceptible to the syndrome. The legislation is certainly better than nothing for those who benefit from it, but certainly not for those many millions who don't and won't, or who benefit only marginally, because it serves --and was designed to serve -- as a bulwark against single payer or some other form of government-underwitten universal health care that actually would benefit everyone.
Instead, we have the formal enshrinement of class-based tiers of health care access and affordability, with opportunities for coverage and access varying dramatically between income groups and even among similar income groups depending upon geography.
#3 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Tue 9 Oct 2012 at 09:06 PM