Last year my firm, a health policy and communications firm called Spectrum, decided to find out for ourselves since no one else really had. We designed a national study, the Spectrum Health Value Study, of how Americans values health products and services, as if they were spending their own money.
The results were interesting. They demonstrated that people tend to like what they already have and don’t want much change. The May 2009 report by Simon & Co., our health affairs partner firm, concluded in part:
- “It is important to maintain lasting public support for health reform. Policy makers must reach out to and reassure the anxious insured that they will not lose their current coverage. Therefore, it is essential that any health reform plan should protect the coverage that most Americans currently have and value. A possible approach might be to devise strategies for making these core services (physician, hospitalization and emergency room services and prescription coverage) more affordable for the anxious insured.
- “Policy makers should approach changing the coverage of preventive services with extreme caution. A consumer-driven approach that allows Americans to choose whether or not to pick up the routine and generally affordable costs of preventive care such as pap smears and PSA tests might be best received by voters.
- “A health reform effort should avoid adding new mandated benefits for health insurance and new public health programs thus upping the overall cost of the legislation in hopes of attracting additional political support from special interests. Policy makers, for example, should resist the temptation to add long-term nursing home benefits to placate the senior citizens’ lobby or occupational health programs for the labor unions.”
One could say we predicted the stall in health reform, but all we did was sample the US population.
I normally jump all over the ‘net because I have the tendancy to read often (which isn’t always a great idea because most blogs just copy from each other) but I must say that yours contains some great substance! Thanks for stopping the trend of just being another copycat site!