Savvy consumers check out charities before they give money...including numbers of how much of donated dollars actually go to the client charity. Yet with health insurance, we hear surprisingly little about consumers checking out the utilization rate for our insurance premium dollars...how much is actually used to pay for medical services. Consumers need to start asking this question: How much of each premium dollar is used for utilization over the past year or two years?
The information is currently difficult to locate which is really strange. The health industry's own group AHIP has conducted such studies, mostly out of a self-righteous attempt to justify health insurance premium increase. Below is such a report cite:
http://www.ahipbelieves.com/press-releases/health-insurance-premium-growth-slows.html
While the insurance company report boasts that up to $.86 of every dollar goes to paying for medical services, the report discloses that the vaguely described "costs of medical liability and defensive medicine" are "EMBEDDED" in that $.86. So the amount of OUR premium dollars actually spent on what we think we're buying which is puffed up to $.86 cents on the dollar, is actually LESS. It's like giving a dollar to a charity and finding out that less than $.86 cents of your dollar actually goes to the charity.
As consumers explore their own options, the utilization rate should be a point of inquiry and such a rate should NOT be puffed up by including vaguely defined amounts for medical liability and defensive medicine that protect doctors not consumers.
This information should be public information for consumers, much like the secretary of state is responsible for keeping track of how much of charity dollars actually go to "charities."
