Does the consumer-driven health insurance gain momentum?

If you had a tighter budget to work with, in fact, if you had a much tighter budget to work with, you would shop around, purchase the economy-size and class groceries, and would avoid miscellaneous expenses.

Many employers are trying to spark this sort of “consumer-driven” behavior into their employees. Employers are particularly offering “consumer-driven” health plans for their employees.

This sort of development is currently under major insurers such as Aetna, CIGNA, Humana, and WellPoint.

Sadly, very few consumers understand the consequences and costs of health care decisions that might come back to haunt s later on. There is a large variety of health care decisions that you can choose from that will help save you money.

The important part is to know what health decisions to make. Thanks to modern websites, and the excellent customer service that most health insurers provide, it isn’t hard to identify what health decisions it is important and necessary to make.

A customer-driven and defined contribution health plans has a border with a blurry line that identifies its differences. Your employer pre-selects and pre-screens a variety of health plans and then gives you cash, under a defined contribution scenario.

Your employer will contract with insurers for group health insurance under a consumer-driven approach. While your health insurance purchases decisions, some measure of control will still be present.

What is great about these plans is that they do what they say. They are driven by consumers and offer consumers a wider range of choice between medical benefits.

Consumers also get to choose their deductible in these plans. Getting to choose deductibles is an excellent feature that will later help consumers help money on their health and auto insurance.

Keep in mind that consumer-driven health coverage plans won’t be covered by many insurers because these plans are brand new.

Less than one percent of all employer-sponsored health insurance is currently comprised of consumer-driven and defined contribution plans, according to Paul Fronstin, a senior research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).

Ray Werntz, president of the Consumer Health Education Council at the EBRI says, “As obtuse as HMO plans are now, they are heavily structured and you don’t really need to understand how they work in order to use them. Traditional managed care just kind of sucks you in and pulls you out along within the system. But consumer-driven health plans have much less structure- you have to have a greater understanding of how it works in order to build your own network of doctors, your own structure.”