No Room In Health Care for Users

The front page of this morning’s Wall Street Journal featured an important story about one of the most important trends in health care today: the rise of consumerism.

For many years, most people had “first-dollar” coverage, where effectively they were paying for all their medical care with someone else’s credit card. In such a world, you have no sensitivity to how much care you are getting or how much it costs, and providers have no incentive to limit it. For employers – and the country – this contributed to rising health care costs that quickly became unsustainable.

That’s why we have seen this shift to health care consumerism in which employees are being asked to pay more for their care, usually in the form of higher deductibles.