Something new is coming to your health insurance plan in 2012. It is a small, one dollar, fee. The money will be used to fund research that will find out which drugs, treatments, medical procedures, and tests work best.
No one likes to find out that there will be an additional fee added to, well, any service that a person is currently paying for. I expect that there will be people who are very angry about the $1.00 fee that will be added to people’s health insurance policies in 2012, even though it is a very small fee.
To clarify, this fee is not going to make your premium payments go up by exactly one dollar. Instead, it will be an annual fee. The fee is not going to add to the profits of your insurance company. That money is going to be used to fund research on the efficacy of drugs, treatments, medical procedures, and medical tests. This fee, and what it will be used for, is part of the Affordable Care Act.
One of the things that will be researched are comparisons between prescription medications, and the generic version of that same medication. Is the name brand really better than the generic version?
Right now, the companies who make the new, expensive, medications are able to afford to create massive amounts of advertisements. You see these ads on TV, and see them on the pages of your favorite magazines. There are some online advertisements as well.
This can lead people to assume that they must have the more expensive name brand prescription drug, because they don’t realize that a less expensive generic form exists. Some people think that “generic” means “not as good”, which isn’t necessarily true all the time.
The fee will allow for research to be done that will scientifically compare the name brand and the generic form of a drug. Research will also compare different treatments methods, medical tests, and medical procedures to learn which is the most effective.
The research is going to be done at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. It is an agency that has been created by Congress. The Institute does not make policy, or laws, or decisions about what health insurance plans should or should not cover, or anything like that. It simply does research, and then makes the evidence that comes from the research available.
There is the potential that at least some health insurance companies will choose to use the evidence found by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. The insurers may base their decisions about which hospitals and doctors they want to steer patients to on the research that shows which doctor are using the most effective forms of treatment.
Theoretically, people who don’t use those doctors or hospitals could be paying a higher co-pay than usual. That doesn’t sound very different from paying more to see a doctor who is “out of network”.
Image by rychlepozicky.com on Flickr