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| Consumer-Driven Health Care |  Consumer-driven health care (CDHC) is based on a basic principles that people should have more rights in managing the costs of their own health care. This should help them make wiser decisions about their use of the health care system.
Consumer-driven health care has been slowly gaining approval during several years. Today CDHC is more common in very large firms, but it will likely get into smaller firms over time.
You have to know that term “CDHC” includes lots of plans like:
- Health savings account with a high deductible insurance plan. This is the most common consumer driven plan. It is also called HSA. This plan requires employers and employees pay pre-tax payment to the HSA. This pre-tax payment will be used to pay for routine and preventative medical care.
HAS provides coverage for catastrophic or high-cost events. In case there are any unused amounts in the savings account can be moved and used in following plan years.
- Another consumer-driven health care plan represents a wide menu of health care choices with changing contribution levels that an employee can choose from the list.
This health care plan is more accurately referred to as a defined contribution plan. However, it is often characterized as consumer-driven, since the employer gives each employee a fixed dollar contribution to apply to the available health care options.
Providing a set of tools to assist people in understanding the complex health care system is a key component of successful consumer-driven health care plans.
While the lower overall costs may attract interest from budget-minded benefits managers, employee satisfaction can be seriously affected if workers feel that they are being left on their own.
Because of the small number of companies currently offering true CDHC plans, correct data on average deductibles and worker contributions is not yet available.
In spite of this, the level of interest shown by many large companies suggests that these plans will quickly become more popular. In fact, some specialists forecast that CDHC will almost completely replace managed health care plans in just a few years, much like managed health care did to traditional insurance.
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