Focus Groups Highlight That Many Patients Object To Clinicians’ Focusing On Costs
- 1 February 2013
- journal article
- Published by Health Affairs (Project Hope) in Health Affairs
- Vol. 32 (2), 338-346
- https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2012.0686
Abstract
Having patients weigh costs when making medical decisions has been proposed as a way to rein in health care spending. We convened twenty-two focus groups of people with insurance to examine their willingness to discuss health care costs with clinicians and consider costs when deciding among nearly comparable clinical options. We identified the following four barriers to patients’ taking cost into account: a preference for what they perceive as the best care, regardless of expense; inexperience with making trade-offs between health and money; a lack of interest in costs borne by insurers and society as a whole; and noncooperative behavior characteristic of a “commons dilemma,” in which people act in their own self-interest although they recognize that by doing so, they are depleting limited resources. Surmounting these barriers will require new research in patient education, comprehensive efforts to shift public attitudes about health care costs, and training to prepare clinicians to discuss costs with their patients.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Cents and Sensitivity — Teaching Physicians to Think about CostsThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2012
- Beyond the “R Word”? Medicine's New FrugalityThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2012
- From an Ethics of Rationing to an Ethics of Waste AvoidanceThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2012
- An Experiment Shows That A Well-Designed Report On Costs And Quality Can Help Consumers Choose High-Value Health CareHealth Affairs, 2012
- Supporting tough decisions in Norway: A healthcare system approachInternational Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 2010
- American Society of Clinical Oncology Guidance Statement: The Cost of Cancer CareJournal of Clinical Oncology, 2009
- Enhancing employee capacity to prioritize health insurance benefitsHealth Expectations, 2007
- Prevalence and determinants of physician bedside rationingJournal of General Internal Medicine, 2006
- Patients' understanding of riskBMJ, 2003
- Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probabilityCognitive Psychology, 1973