Patients Pick Most Expensive Procedure When Given a Choice

Providing patients with transparent information about pricing and quality will solve nothing in the battle to contain escalating healthcare costs, because patients will pick the most expensive treatment or procedure.

If given the choice between a BMW and a Honda, patients will pick the BMW if they themselves are not paying for it, writes Cari Frank in Health Policy Solutions. Frank cites the results of a series of focus groups published in last month’s Health Affairs that found that patients, when given a choice, will not choose the most economic medical procedure or service, even when they know that the cost is borne by someone else (e.g., insurers or employers) or that their choice can negatively affect the common good.

The author Frank is not a clinician, but a public relations professional working in healthcare. What she lacks in medical knowledge, she makes up for in understanding human behavior.

“However, until patients and providers are both incentivized to select the lowest cost, highest quality services, providing information may not be enough to see the changes that our system needs,” she writes. Without incentives to select the most economical care, the choice will always favor the most expensive procedures and services.