Harvard’s David Cutler visited Cato yesterday to participate in a small group discussion about cost-effectiveness in medicine, and also in a panel on improving quality in Medicare. (You can watch the latter event here in a couple of days.) My colleague Arnold Kling blogs about issues discussed at both events.
I am struck by one issue that emerged, which has to do with price-sensitivity, provider behavior, and health outcomes. Cutler argued that when patients are more price-sensitive (i.e., when they have to pay for more of the cost of their medical care), they tend to cut back both on care that would have done nothing for them, and on care that would have helped them. He postulates that if we were to move all Americans into health savings accounts (HSAs), thereby making patients more price-sensitive, we would see worse health outcomes than we see now.
I am skeptical of that prediction. I think that if the move to HSAs were confined to a small, randomly selected subset of the population (call it “Rand II”), Cutler’s prediction would be more plausible — though by no means certain. There is precious little evidence that suggests — and it does no more than suggest — that for some patients, greater price-sensitivity leads to worse health outcomes.
However, even if we assume that Rand II would show that greater price-sensitivity leads to worse health outcomes, it does not follow that we would get the same result were the entire population made more price-sensitive. The reason is that with a population-wide shift, the supply side of health care markets would respond to the enormous change on the demand side. Faced with patients who are less eager to consume medical care, providers would have to do a lot more to sell their services, including:
- conducting research on the usefulness of their services,
- improving the quality of their services,
- lowering their prices, and
- educating patients about the value of their services.