What patients pay: Dr. Don Berwick and Jim Capretta debate shifting health care costs

Already there’s a growing trend in health care to move more of the cost of care onto patients in an effort to make them think twice about what they need and how to protect and their financial interest. In Massachusetts, for example, enrollment in limited or tiered health plans is on the rise. Such plans offer cheaper premiums but penalize people for using providers thought to be higher cost.
Dr. Don Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, and Jim Capretta, who serviced as associate director at the White House Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush, took sharply different stances on what shifting costs to patients could mean during a wide-ranging debate last night hosted by the Pioneer Institute.

Berwick, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, called the idea of giving patients more “skin in the game” a “vicious idea.”

“Most people do not use health care as a recreational good,” he said.

http://www.boston.com/Boston/whitecoatnotes/2012/04/what-patients-pay-don-berwick-and-jim-capretta-debate-shifting-health-care-costs/ecIrKifQiqwTsiQfYweZ5K/index.html